针对偏倚特征干扰样本权重的问题,提出加权去偏方法提升数据代表性。
Feature-Weighted Maximum Representative Subsampling
- 基于特征重要性加权,降低高偏倚特征对样本权重的影响。
- 在8个人工偏置表格数据集上保持下游任务性能无显著下降。
- 适用于社会科学研究中需保留关键特征的去偏场景。
在社会科学中,研究和调查需去偏后才能得出有效结论。去偏算法通过样本权重实现计算去偏,但当仅少数特征高度偏倚而其余特征已具代表性时,现有方法会过度调整样本分布,反而引入新偏倚。为此,本文提出特征加权最大代表性子采样(FW-MRS),在最大代表性子采样(MRS)基础上引入特征权重,减弱高偏倚特征的影响,从而保留更多实例用于下游任务。特征权重由区分代表性与非代表性数据集的领域分类器所生成。我们在8个人工偏置的表格数据集上验证了该方法,结果显示其在下游任务中的泛化性能无显著差异。此外,该方法应用于一个真实社会科学研究数据集。源代码可在https://github.com/kramerlab/FeatureWeightDebiasing获取。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In the social sciences, it is often necessary to debias studies and surveys before valid conclusions can be drawn. Debiasing algorithms enable the computational removal of bias using sample weights. However, an issue arises when only a subset of features is highly biased, while the rest is already representative. Algorithms need to strongly alter the sample distribution to manage a few highly biased features, which can in turn introduce bias into already representative variables. To address this issue, we developed a method that uses feature weights to minimize the impact of highly biased features on the computation of sample weights. Our algorithm is based on Maximum Representative Subsampling (MRS), which debiases datasets by aligning a non-representative sample with a representative one through iterative removal of elements to create a representative subsample. The new algorithm, named feature-weighted MRS (FW-MRS), decreases the emphasis on highly biased features, allowing it to retain more instances for downstream tasks. The feature weights are derived from the feature importance of a domain classifier trained to differentiate between the representative and non-representative datasets. We validated FW-MRS using eight tabular datasets, each of which we artificially biased. Biased features can be important for downstream tasks, and focusing less on them could lead to a decline in generalization. For this reason, we assessed the generalization performance of FW-MRS on downstream tasks and found no statistically significant differences. Additionally, FW-MRS was applied to a real-world dataset from the social sciences. The source code is available at https://github.com/kramerlab/FeatureWeightDebiasing.
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