Thursday, January 31, 2019

Understanding and misunderstanding algorithmic bias

Adventures in Computation explains a recent political discussion:

Algorithmic Unfairness Without Any Bias Baked In
"Discussion of (un)fairness in machine learning hit mainstream political discourse this week, when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed the possibility of algorithmic bias, and was clumsily "called out" by Ryan Saavedra on twitter.
...
"Bias in the data is certainly a problem, especially when labels are gathered by human beings. But its far from being the only problem. In this post, I want to walk through a very simple example in which the algorithm designer is being entirely reasonable, there are no human beings injecting bias into the labels, and yet the resulting outcome is "unfair".

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