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Data distribution debugging in machine learning pipelines

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Abstract

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used to automate impactful decisions, and the risks arising from this widespread use are garnering attention from policy makers, scientists, and the media. ML applications are often brittle with respect to their input data, which leads to concerns about their correctness, reliability, and fairness. In this paper, we describe mlinspect, a library that helps diagnose and mitigate technical bias that may arise during preprocessing steps in an ML pipeline. We refer to these problems collectively as data distribution bugs. The key idea is to extract a directed acyclic graph representation of the dataflow from a preprocessing pipeline and to use this representation to automatically instrument the code with predefined inspections. These inspections are based on a lightweight annotation propagation approach to propagate metadata such as lineage information from operator to operator. In contrast to existing work, mlinspect operates on declarative abstractions of popular data science libraries like estimator/transformer pipelines and does not require manual code instrumentation. We discuss the design and implementation of the mlinspect library and give a comprehensive end-to-end example that illustrates its functionality.

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Notes

  1. https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/compose.html.

  2. https://github.com/tensorflow/transform.

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_treatment.

  4. Note that TensorFlow Transform refers to estimators and transformers as TensorFlow Transform Analyzers and TensorFlow Ops https://www.tensorflow.org/tfx/tutorials/transform/simple?hl=en.

  5. https://pypi.org/project/gorilla/.

  6. https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html.

  7. https://github.com/stefan-grafberger/mlinspect/tree/19ca0d6ae8672249891835190c9e2d9d3c14f28f/example_pipelines.

  8. https://github.com/stefan-grafberger/mlinspect/blob/19ca0d6ae8672249891835190c9e2d9d3c14f28f/demo/feature_overview/feature_overview.ipynb.

  9. https://github.com/stefan-grafberger/mlinspect-exploratory-user-study/tree/b9546a7ff675af95811d3fe0c517093eb184e8d2.

  10. https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow.

  11. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34802465/sklearn-is-there-any-way-to-debug-pipelines.

  12. https://github.com/gems-uff/noworkflow.

  13. https://github.com/gems-uff/noworkflow/blob/cbb8964eba7d58a5e87f96fb5bb91ac452b80763/capture/noworkflow/now/collection/prov_execution/profiler.py.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Ahold Delhaize, and by NSF Awards No. 1934464, 1916505 and 1922658. All contents represent the opinion of the authors, which is not necessarily shared or endorsed by their respective employers and/or sponsors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Stefan Grafberger, Paul Groth & Sebastian Schelter

  2. New York University, New York, USA

    Julia Stoyanovich

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  1. Stefan Grafberger
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Correspondence to Sebastian Schelter.

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Grafberger, S., Groth, P., Stoyanovich, J. et al. Data distribution debugging in machine learning pipelines. The VLDB Journal 31, 1103–1126 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00726-w

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