Drivendata has come out with a new tool, named, Deon, which allows you to easily add an ethics checklist to your data science projects. Deon is aimed at pushing the conversation about ethics in data science, machine learning, and Artificial intelligence by providing actionable reminders to data scientists.
According to the Deon team, “it’s not up to data scientists alone to decide what the ethical course of action is. This has always been a responsibility of organizations that are part of civil society. This checklist is designed to provoke conversations around issues where data scientists have particular responsibility and perspective”.
Deon comes with a default checklist, but you can also develop your own custom checklists by removing items and sections, or marking items as N/A depending on the needs of the project. There are also real-world examples linked with each item in the default checklist.
To be able to run Deon for your data science projects, you need to have Python 3 or greater. Let’s now discuss the two types of checklists, Default, and Custom, that comes with Deon.
The default checklist comprises of sections on Data Collection, Data Storage, Analysis, Modeling, and Deployment.
This checklist covers information on informed consent, Collection Bias, and Limit PII exposure.
This checklist covers sections such as Data security, Right to be forgotten and Data retention plan.
This section comprises information on Missing perspectives, Dataset bias, Honest representation, Privacy in analysis and Auditability.
This offers information on Proxy discrimination, Fairness across groups, Metric selection, Explainability, and Communicate bias.
This covers topics such as Redress, Roll back, Concept drift, and Unintended use.
For your projects with particular concerns, it is recommended to create your own checklist.yml file. Custom checklists are required to follow the same schema as checklist.yml. Custom Checklists need to have a top-level title which is a string, and sections which are a list. Each section in the list must have a title, a section_id, and then a list of lines. Each line must include a line_id, a line_summary, and a line string which is the content.
When changing the default checklist, it is necessary to keep in mind that Deon’s goal is to have checklist items that are actionable. This is why users are advised to avoid suggesting items that are vague (e.g., “do no harm”) or extremely specific (e.g., “remove social security numbers from data”).
For more information, be sure to check out the official Drivendata blog post.
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