Aequitas: A Bias and Fairness Audit Toolkit

Recent work has raised concerns on the risk of unintended bias in algorithmic decision making systems being used nowadays that can affect individuals unfairly based on race, gender or religion, among other possible characteristics. While a lot of bias metrics and fairness definitions have been proposed in recent years, there is no consensus on which metric/definition should be used and there are very few available resources to operationalize them. Therefore, despite recent awareness, auditing for bias and fairness when developing and deploying algorithmic decision making systems is not yet a standard practice. We present Aequitas, an open source bias and fairness audit toolkit that is an intuitive and easy to use addition to the machine learning workflow, enabling users to seamlessly test models for several bias and fairness metrics in relation to multiple population sub-groups. We believe Aequitas will facilitate informed and equitable decisions around developing and deploying algorithmic decision making systems for both data scientists, machine learning researchers and policymakers.