The Impact of Presentation Style on Human-In-The-Loop Detection of Algorithmic Bias

Po-Ming Law, Sana Malik, Fan Du, Moumita Sinha

Keywords: algorithmic bias, machine learning fairness, lab study

TL;DR: We studied how visual cues and recommendation list might affect user behaviors as they review algorithmic bias reports generated by semi-automated bias detection tools.

Abstract: While decision makers have begun to employ machine learning, machine learning models may make predictions that bias against certain demographic groups. Semi-automated bias detection tools often present reports of automatically-detected biases using a recommendation list or visual cues. However, there is a lack of guidance concerning which presentation style to use in what scenarios. We conducted a small lab study with 16 participants to investigate how presentation style might affect user behaviors in reviewing bias reports. Participants used both a prototype with a recommendation list and a prototype with visual cues for bias detection. We found that participants often wanted to investigate the performance measures that were not automatically detected as biases. Yet, when using the prototype with a recommendation list, they tended to give less consideration to such measures. Grounded in the findings, we propose information load and comprehensiveness as two axes for characterizing bias detection tasks and illustrate how the two axes could be adopted to reason about when to use a recommendation list or visual cues.