Lightweight Inspection of Data Preprocessing in Native Machine Learning Pipelines

Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly used to automate impactful decisions, and the risks arising from this wide-spread use are garnering attention from policy makers, scientists, and the media. ML applications are often very brittle with respect to their input data, which leads to concerns about their reliability, accountability, and fairness. In this paper we discuss such hard-to-identify data issues and describe ‘mlinspect’, a library that enables lightweight lineage-based inspection of ML preprocessing pipelines. The key idea is to extract a directed acyclic graph representation of the dataflow from ML preprocessing pipelines in Python, and to use this representation to automatically instrument the code with predefined inspections based on a lightweight annotation propagation approach. In contrast to existing work, mlinspect operates on declarative abstractions of popular data science libraries like estimator/transformer pipelines and does not require manual code instrumentation. We discuss the design and implementation of the mlinspect prototype, and give a complex end-to-end example that illustrates its functionality.