dsldTakeALookAround: dsldTakeALookAround

In dsld: Data Science Looks at Discrimination

dsldTakeALookAround

Description

Evaluate feature sets for predicting Y while considering the Fairness-Utility Tradeoff.

Usage

dsldTakeALookAround(data, yName, sName, maxFeatureSetSize = (ncol(data) - 2), 
    holdout = floor(min(1000,0.1*nrow(data))))

Arguments

data	Data frame.
yName	Name of the response variable column.
sName	Name of the sensitive attribute column.
maxFeatureSetSize	Maximum number of combinations of features to be included in the data frame.
holdout	If not NULL, form a holdout set of the specified size. After fitting to the remaining data, evaluate accuracy on the test set.

Details

This function provides a tool for exploring feature combinations to use in predicting an outcome Y from features X and a sensitive variable S.

The features in X will first be considered singly, then doubly and so on, up though feature combination size maxFeatureSetSize. Y is prediction from X either a linear model (numeric Y) or logit (dichotomous Y).

The accuracy (based on qeML holdout) will be computed for each of these cases: (a) Y predicted from the given feature combination C, (b) Y predicted from the given feature combination C plus S, and (c) S predicted from C. The difference between columns 'a' and 'b' shows the sacrifice in utility stemming from not using S in our prediction of Y. (Due to sampling variation, it is possible for column 'b' to be larger than 'a'.) The value in column 'c' shows fairness, the smaller the fairer.

Value

Data frame whose first column consists of the variable names, followed by columns 'a', 'b' and 'c' as described in 'details'.

Author(s)

N. Matloff, A. Ashok, S. Martha, A. Mittal

Examples

# investigate predictive accuracy for a continuous Y,
# 'wageinc', using the default arguments for maxFeatureSetSize = 4
data(svcensus)
dsldTakeALookAround(svcensus, 'wageinc', 'gender', 4)

# investigate the predictive accuracy for a categorical Y, 
# 'educ', using the default arguments for maxFeatureSetSize = 4
dsldTakeALookAround(svcensus, 'educ', 'gender')

dsld documentation built on Sept. 14, 2024, 1:08 a.m.