让机器学习流程可复现、可扩展,尤其适合公平性研究。
flowengineR: A Modular and Extensible Framework for Fair and Reproducible Workflow Design in R
- 用模块化引擎设计流程,每步任务独立且接口轻量。
- 支持公平性干预方法的灵活集成与对比评估。
- 适合关注可复现性、透明度的研究者和开发者。
flowengineR 是一个 R 包,提供模块化、可扩展的框架,用于构建通用机器学习流水线的可复现算法流程。其动机源于算法公平性领域快速演进,新指标、缓解策略和方法不断涌现。现有工具往往只聚焦单一干预,或把可复现性和可扩展性视为次要而非核心设计原则。flowengineR 通过统一架构实现数据划分、执行、预处理、训练、在处理、后处理、评估和报告等标准化引擎。每个引擎封装一项任务,通过轻量接口通信,确保流程透明、可审计且易扩展。尽管基于 R,但借鉴了 CWL、YAWL、KNIME 及 BatchJobs 等思想,重点在于将引擎作为数据结构进行简便设置与管理,而非强调并行容错。这种职责分离支持分布式开发与集成。在公平性场景中,通过将公平性方法设为可互换引擎,研究者可跨建模流程集成、比较和评估干预措施。该架构亦可泛化至可解释性、鲁棒性及合规性评估,无需核心修改。虽起源于公平性,但最终提供了一个以可复现性、透明度和可扩展性为核心的一般性工作流基础设施。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
flowengineR is an R package designed to provide a modular and extensible framework for building reproducible algorithmic workflows for general-purpose machine learning pipelines. It is motivated by the rapidly evolving field of algorithmic fairness, where new metrics, mitigation strategies, and methods continuously emerge. A central challenge in fairness, but also far beyond, is that existing toolkits either focus narrowly on single interventions or treat reproducibility and extensibility as secondary considerations rather than core design principles. flowengineR addresses this by introducing a unified architecture of standardized engines for data splitting, execution, preprocessing, training, inprocessing, postprocessing, evaluation, and reporting. Each engine encapsulates one methodological task yet communicates via a lightweight interface, ensuring workflows remain transparent, auditable, and easily extensible. Although implemented in R, flowengineR builds on ideas from workflow languages (CWL, YAWL), graph-oriented visual programming languages (KNIME), and R frameworks (BatchJobs, batchtools). Its emphasis, however, is less on orchestrating engines for resilient parallel execution than on the straightforward setup and management of distinct engines as data structures. This orthogonalization enables distributed responsibilities, independent development, and streamlined integration. In the context of fairness, by structuring fairness methods as interchangeable engines, flowengineR lets researchers integrate, compare, and evaluate interventions across the modeling pipeline. At the same time, the architecture generalizes to explainability, robustness, and compliance metrics without core modifications. While motivated by fairness, flowengineR ultimately provides a general infrastructure for any workflow context where reproducibility, transparency, and extensibility are essential.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。