Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do in Data Science?

“The model is optimized for efficiency and profitability, not for justice or the good of the “team”. This is, of course, the nature of capitalism.”

[Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’neil]

Michel J Sandel’s magnum opus, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, called our attention to justice (and fairness) in a period of prosperity of capitalism. Data science acts in a similar fashion of capitalism. More data (money) is more powerful and the efficiency (profitability) is the most important factor for its success. Hence, in Data Science, we should consider that fairness and efficiency (and profitability) are compatible.

To take fairness into the consideration in data-driven models, we need to think over what we can do. First, we should double-check that our data are unbiased. Specifically, historical data are often biased due to different historical backgrounds. So when combining long-time history data, we need delicate effort to eliminate hidden bias. Moreover, we add “fairness” to the main objectives in data-driven models directly. Here, we have the problem of how to quantify fairness (also justice and morality). Hence, it is still challenging to make the fair model but it is not impossible.