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BiasOnDemand

DOI Build Status License: MIT

BiasOnDemand is a Python package that generates synthetic datasets with different types of bias. This package is based on the research paper "Bias on Demand: A Modelling Framework That Generates Synthetic Data With Bias" published at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) 2023.

The quickest way to generate a new (biased) dataset is to use

pip install biasondemand

as described in the instructions provided in the release package repo:

⭐ https://github.com/joebaumann/biasondemand ⭐.

If you are interested in the experiments to investigate bias, fairness, and mitigation techniques, continue reading.

Authors & Contributors

Joachim Baumann, Alessandro Castelnovo, Riccardo Crupi, Nicole Inverardi, Daniele Regoli

Installation

To use BiasOnDemand, clone the repository and install the required packages:

git clone https://github.com/rcrupiISP/BiasOnDemand.git
cd BiasOnDemand
pip install -r requirements.txt

BiasOnDemand requires Python 3.8.10 or later.

Usage

Generating Synthetic Datasets

To generate a synthetic dataset with no bias, use the following command:

python generate_dataset.py -p my_unbiased_dataset -dim 1000

This will generate a dataset with 1000 rows and save it in the directory datasets/my_unbiased_dataset/.

You can introduce different types of bias into the dataset by specifying command line arguments. For example, to generate a dataset with measurement bias on the label Y (magnitude: 1.5) and historical bias on the feature R (magnitude: 2), use the following command:

python generate_dataset.py -p my_biased_dataset -dim 1000 -l_m_y 1.5 -l_h_r 2

This will generate a biased dataset with 1000 rows and save it in the directory datasets/my_biased_dataset/.

The following command line arguments are available to specify properties of the dataset:

  • dim: Dimension of the dataset
  • sy: Standard deviation of the noise of Y
  • l_q: Lambda coefficient for importance of Q for Y
  • l_r_q: Lambda coefficient that quantifies the influence from R to Q
  • thr_supp: Threshold correlation for discarding features too much correlated with s

Furthermore, the following command line arguments are available to specify the types of biases to be introduced in the dataset:

  • l_y: Lambda coefficient for historical bias on the target y
  • l_m_y: Lambda coefficient for measurement bias on the target y
  • l_h_r: Lambda coefficient for historical bias on R
  • l_h_q: Lambda coefficient for historical bias on Q
  • l_m: Lambda coefficient for measurement bias on the feature R. If l_m!=0 P substitutes R.
  • p_u: Percentage of undersampling instance with A=1
  • l_r: Boolean for inducing representation bias, that is undersampling conditioning on a variable, e.g. R
  • l_o: Boolean variable for excluding an important variable (ommited variable bias), e.g. R (or its proxy)
  • l_y_b: Lambda coefficient for interaction proxy bias, i.e., historical bias on the label y with lower values of y for individuals in group A=1 with high values for the feature R

Notice that the biases are introduced w.r.t. idividuals in the group A=1. For most types of bias, larger values mean more bias. The only exceptions are undersampling and representation bias (which can be seen as a specific type of undersampling conditional on the feature R) where smaller values correspond to more (conditional) undersampling, i.e., more bias.

Investigating Bias, Fairness, and Mitigation Techniques

To investigate bias, fairness, and mitigation techniques, use the following command:

python plots.py

This will generate various plots for different scenarios (i.e., datasets containing different magnitudes and types of bias). You can comment out the different types of plots to be generated at the end of the plots.py file or adjust the bias_plots function to only include preferred scenarios to speed it up.

Citation

If you use BiasOnDemand in your research, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{baumann2023bias,
  title={Bias on Demand: A Modelling Framework That Generates Synthetic Data With Bias},
  author={Baumann, Joachim and Castelnovo, Alessandro and Crupi, Riccardo and Inverardi, Nicole and Regoli, Daniele},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594058},
  year={2023}
}