FairLay-ML: Intuitive Debugging of Fairness in Data-Driven Social-Critical Software

TL;DR

FairLay-ML is a debugging tool that visualizes and tests the fairness of data-driven decision-making models, helping developers identify biases and understand fairness implications through counterfactual testing and model comparison.

Contribution

The paper introduces FairLay-ML, a novel tool for debugging fairness in data-driven software, incorporating visualization, multiple model training, and counterfactual fairness testing.

Findings

FairLay-ML effectively identifies fairness bugs beyond datasets.

The tool provides insights into human perception of fairness.

Benchmark results demonstrate its accuracy and usability.

Abstract

Data-driven software solutions have significantly been used in critical domains with significant socio-economic, legal, and ethical implications. The rapid adoptions of data-driven solutions, however, pose major threats to the trustworthiness of automated decision-support software. A diminished understanding of the solution by the developer and historical/current biases in the data sets are primary challenges. To aid data-driven software developers and end-users, we present FairLay-ML, a debugging tool to test and explain the fairness implications of data-driven solutions. FairLay-ML visualizes the logic of datasets, trained models, and decisions for a given data point. In addition, it trains various models with varying fairness-accuracy trade-offs. Crucially, FairLay-ML incorporates counterfactual fairness testing that finds bugs beyond the development datasets. We conducted two studies through FairLay-ML that allowed us to measure false positives/negatives in prevalent counterfactual testing and understand the human perception of counterfactual test cases in a class survey. FairLay-ML and its benchmarks are publicly available at https://github.com/Pennswood/FairLay-ML. The live version of the tool is available at https://fairlayml-v2.streamlit.app/. We provide a video demo of the tool at https://youtu.be/wNI9UWkywVU?t=133.