Open Access
Less can be more: representational vs. stereotypical gender bias in facial expression recognition
(Springer, 2024-10-14) Domínguez Catena, Iris; Paternain Dallo, Daniel; Jurío Munárriz, Aránzazu; Galar Idoate, Mikel; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Universidad Publica de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
Machine learning models can inherit biases from their training data, leading to discriminatory or inaccurate predictions. This is particularly concerning with the increasing use of large, unsupervised datasets for training foundational models. Traditionally, demographic biases within these datasets have not been well-understood, limiting our ability to understand how they propagate to the models themselves. To address this issue, this paper investigates the propagation of demographic biases from datasets into machine learning models. We focus on the gender demographic component, analyzing two types of bias: representational and stereotypical. For our analysis, we consider the domain of facial expression recognition (FER), a field known to exhibit biases in most popular datasets. We use Affectnet, one of the largest FER datasets, as our baseline for carefully designing and generating subsets that incorporate varying strengths of both representational and stereotypical bias. Subsequently, we train several models on these biased subsets, evaluating their performance on a common test set to assess the propagation of bias into the models¿ predictions. Our results show that representational bias has a weaker impact than expected. Models exhibit a good generalization ability even in the absence of one gender in the training dataset. Conversely, stereotypical bias has a significantly stronger impact, primarily concentrated on the biased class, although it can also influence predictions for unbiased classes. These results highlight the need for a bias analysis that differentiates between types of bias, which is crucial for the development of effective bias mitigation strategies.
Open Access
DSAP: analyzing bias through demographic comparison of datasets
(Elsevier, 2024-10-29) Domínguez Catena, Iris; Paternain Dallo, Daniel; Galar Idoate, Mikel; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Universidad Publica de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa ; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua
In the last few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have become increasingly widespread. Unfortunately, these systems can share many biases with human decision-making, including demographic biases. Often, these biases can be traced back to the data used for training, where large uncurated datasets have become the norm. Despite our awareness of these biases, we still lack general tools to detect, quantify, and compare them across different datasets. In this work, we propose DSAP (Demographic Similarity from Auxiliary Profiles), a two-step methodology for comparing the demographic composition of datasets. First, DSAP uses existing demographic estimation models to extract a dataset's demographic profile. Second, it applies a similarity metric to compare the demographic profiles of different datasets. While these individual components are well-known, their joint use for demographic dataset comparison is novel and has not been previously addressed in the literature. This approach allows three key applications: the identification of demographic blind spots and bias issues across datasets, the measurement of demographic bias, and the assessment of demographic shifts over time. DSAP can be used on datasets with or without explicit demographic information, provided that demographic information can be derived from the samples using auxiliary models, such as those for image or voice datasets. To show the usefulness of the proposed methodology, we consider the Facial Expression Recognition task, where demographic bias has previously been found. The three applications are studied over a set of twenty datasets with varying properties. The code is available at https://github.com/irisdominguez/DSAP.
Open Access
Metrics for dataset demographic bias: a case study on facial expression recognition
(IEEE, 2024) Domínguez Catena, Iris; Paternain Dallo, Daniel; Galar Idoate, Mikel; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Universidad Pública de Navarra - Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
Demographic biases in source datasets have been shown as one of the causes of unfairness and discrimination in the predictions of Machine Learning models. One of the most prominent types of demographic bias are statistical imbalances in the representation of demographic groups in the datasets. In this paper, we study the measurement of these biases by reviewing the existing metrics, including those that can be borrowed from other disciplines. We develop a taxonomy for the classification of these metrics, providing a practical guide for the selection of appropriate metrics. To illustrate the utility of our framework, and to further understand the practical characteristics of the metrics, we conduct a case study of 20 datasets used in Facial Emotion Recognition (FER), analyzing the biases present in them. Our experimental results show that many metrics are redundant and that a reduced subset of metrics may be sufficient to measure the amount of demographic bias. The paper provides valuable insights for researchers in AI and related fields to mitigate dataset bias and improve the fairness and accuracy of AI models.

Domínguez Catena, Iris

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