Passing pipelines to mitigation techniques

This notebook shows how to pass sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline to mitigation techniques from Fairlearn. Note that the notebook is not to be used as an example for how to assess and mitigate fairness. It is merely a demonstration of the technical aspects of passing sklearn.pipeline.Pipeline. For more information around proper fairness assessment and mitigation please refer to the User Guide.

import json

from sklearn.compose import ColumnTransformer
from sklearn.compose import make_column_selector as selector
from sklearn.impute import SimpleImputer
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from sklearn.preprocessing import OneHotEncoder, StandardScaler

from fairlearn.datasets import fetch_adult
from fairlearn.postprocessing import ThresholdOptimizer, plot_threshold_optimizer
from fairlearn.reductions import DemographicParity, ExponentiatedGradient

Below we load the “Adult” census dataset and split its features, sensitive features, and labels into train and test sets.

data = fetch_adult()
X_raw = data.data
y = (data.target == ">50K") * 1
A = X_raw["sex"]

(X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test, A_train, A_test) = train_test_split(
    X_raw, y, A, test_size=0.3, random_state=12345, stratify=y
)

X_train = X_train.reset_index(drop=True)
X_test = X_test.reset_index(drop=True)
y_train = y_train.reset_index(drop=True)
y_test = y_test.reset_index(drop=True)
A_train = A_train.reset_index(drop=True)
A_test = A_test.reset_index(drop=True)

To illustrate Fairlearn’s compatibility with Pipeline we first need to build our pipeline. In the following we assemble a pipeline by combining preprocessing steps with an estimator. The preprocessing steps include imputing, scaling for numerical features and one-hot encoding for categorical features.

numeric_transformer = Pipeline(
    steps=[
        ("impute", SimpleImputer()),
        ("scaler", StandardScaler()),
    ]
)
categorical_transformer = Pipeline(
    [
        ("impute", SimpleImputer(strategy="most_frequent")),
        ("ohe", OneHotEncoder(handle_unknown="ignore")),
    ]
)
preprocessor = ColumnTransformer(
    transformers=[
        ("num", numeric_transformer, selector(dtype_exclude="category")),
        ("cat", categorical_transformer, selector(dtype_include="category")),
    ]
)

pipeline = Pipeline(
    steps=[
        ("preprocessor", preprocessor),
        (
            "classifier",
            LogisticRegression(solver="liblinear", fit_intercept=True),
        ),
    ]
)

Below we will pass the pipeline to some of our mitigation techniques, starting with fairlearn.postprocessing.ThresholdOptimizer:

threshold_optimizer = ThresholdOptimizer(
    estimator=pipeline,
    constraints="demographic_parity",
    predict_method="predict_proba",
    prefit=False,
)
threshold_optimizer.fit(X_train, y_train, sensitive_features=A_train)
print(threshold_optimizer.predict(X_test, sensitive_features=A_test))
print(
    json.dumps(
        threshold_optimizer.interpolated_thresholder_.interpolation_dict,
        default=str,
        indent=4,
    )
)
plot_threshold_optimizer(threshold_optimizer)

[0 0 1 ... 0 0 1]
{
    "Female": {
        "p0": 0.8004605263157903,
        "operation0": "[>0.20325171890519633]",
        "p1": 0.19953947368420966,
        "operation1": "[>0.1873222488873632]"
    },
    "Male": {
        "p0": 0.08521658986175128,
        "operation0": "[>0.6820821878663272]",
        "p1": 0.9147834101382487,
        "operation1": "[>0.665722231006347]"
    }
}

Similarly, fairlearn.reductions.ExponentiatedGradient works with pipelines. Since it requires the sample_weight parameter of the underlying estimator internally we need to provide it with the correct way of passing sample_weight to just the "classifier" step using the step name followed by two underscores and sample_weight.

exponentiated_gradient = ExponentiatedGradient(
    estimator=pipeline,
    constraints=DemographicParity(),
    sample_weight_name="classifier__sample_weight",
)
exponentiated_gradient.fit(X_train, y_train, sensitive_features=A_train)
print(exponentiated_gradient.predict(X_test))

[0 0 1 ... 0 0 1]