A screenshot from SageMaker Clarify
SageMaker Clarify is integrated with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, making it easier to identify bias during data preparation. You specify attributes of interest, such as gender or age, and SageMaker Clarify runs a set of algorithms to detect any presence of bias in those attributes.
Credit: AWS

How Clarify helps machine learning developers detect unintended bias

Learn why the science team behind Clarify turned to a concept from 1951 to address a modern complexity.

In his machine learning keynote at re:Invent on Tuesday, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of machine learning, Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced Amazon SageMaker Clarify, a new service that helps customers detect statistical bias in their data and machine learning models, and helps explain why their models are making specific predictions. Clarify saves developers time and effort by providing them the ability to better understand and explain how their machine learning models arrive at their predictions.

Understanding the predictions made by machine learning (ML) models and their potential biases remains a challenging and labor-intensive task that depends on the application, the dataset, and the specific model. We present Amazon SageMaker Clarify, an explainability feature for Amazon SageMaker that launched in December 2020, providing insights into data and ML models by identifying biases and explaining

Developers today contend with both increasingly large volumes of data, as well as more complex machine learning models. In order to detect bias in those complex models and data sets, developers must rely on open-source libraries replete with custom code recipes that are inconsistent across machine learning frameworks. This tedious approach requires a lot of manual effort and often arrives too late to correct unintended bias.

“If you care about this stuff, it's pretty much a roll-your-own situation right now,” said University of Pennsylvania computer science professor and Amazon Scholar Michael Kearns, who provided guidance to the team of scientists that developed SageMaker Clarify. “If you want to do some practical bias detection, you either need to implement it yourself or go to one of the open-source libraries, which vary in quality. They're frequently not well-maintained or documented. In many cases, it's just, ‘Here is the code we used to run our experiments for this academic paper, good luck.’”

SageMaker Clarify helps address the challenges of relying on multiple open-source libraries by offering robust, reliable code in an integrated, cloud-based framework.

Increasingly complex networks

The efficacy of machine learning models depends in part on understanding how much influence a given input has on the output.

AWS on Air 2020: AWS What’s Next ft. Amazon SageMaker Clarify

“A lending model for consumer loans might include credit history, employment history, and how long someone has lived at their current address,” Kearns explained. “It might also utilize variables that aren't specifically financial, such as demographic variables. One thing you might naturally want to know is which of these variables is more important in the model’s predictions, which may be used in lending decisions, and which are less important.”

With linear models, each variable is assigned some weight, positive or negative, and the overall decision is a sum of those weighted inputs. In those cases, the inputs with the bigger weights clearly have more influence on the output.

However, that approach falls short with neural networks or more complicated, non-linear models. “When you get to models like neural networks, it's no longer a simple matter of determining or measuring the influence of an input on the output,” Kearns said.

To help account for the growing complexity of modern machine learning models, the Amazon science team looked to the past — specifically to an idea from 1951.

Shapley values

The team wanted to design a solution to help machine learning pros be able to better explain their models’ decisions in the face of growing complexity. They found inspiration in a popular scientific method called Shapley values.

Shapley values were named in honor of Lloyd Shapley, who introduced the idea in 1951 and who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for it in 2012. The Shapley value approach, which is rooted in game theory, considers a wide range of possible inputs and outputs and offers “the average marginal contribution of a feature value across all possible coalitions”.  The comprehensive nature of the approach means it can help provide a framework for understanding the relative weight of a set of inputs, even across complex models and multiple inputs.

“SageMaker Clarify utilizes Shapley values to essentially take your model and run a number of experiments on it or on your data set,” Kearns said. “It then uses that to help come up with a visualization and quantification of which of those inputs is more or less important.”

Nor does it matter which kind of model a developer uses. “One of the nice things about this approach is it is model agnostic,” Kearns said. “It performs input-output experiments and gives you some sense of the relative importance of the different inputs to the output decision.”

The science team also worked to be certain SageMaker Clarify had a comprehensive view. They designed it so everyday developers and data scientists can detect bias across the entire machine learning workflow — including data preparation, training, and inference. SageMaker Clarify is able to achieve that comprehensive view, Kearns explained, because (again) it is model agnostic. “Each of these steps has been designed to avoid making strong assumptions about the type of model that the user is building.”

Bias detection and explainability

Model builders who learn that their models are making predictions that are strongly correlated to a specific input may find those predictions fall short of their definition of fairness. Kearns offered the example of a lending company that discovers its model’s predictions are skewed. “That company will want to understand why its model is making predictions that might lead to decisions to give loans at a lower rate to group A than to group B, even if they're equally credit worthy.”

SageMaker Clarify can examine tabular data and help the modelers spot where gaps might exist. “This company would upload a spreadsheet of data showing who they gave loans to, what they knew about them, et cetera,” Kearns said. “What the data bias detection part does is say, ‘For these columns, there may be over or underrepresentation of certain features, which could lead to a discriminatory outcome if not addressed.’”

A screenshot from SageMaker Clarify
SageMaker Clarify is integrated with SageMaker Model Monitor, enabling you to configure alerting systems like Amazon CloudWatch to notify you if your model exceeds certain bias metric thresholds. 
Credit: AWS

That can be influenced by a number of factors, including simply lacking the correct data to build accurate predictions. For example, SageMaker Clarify can indicate whether modelers have enough data on certain groups of applicants to expect an accurate prediction. The metrics provided by SageMaker Clarify can then be used to correct unintended bias in machine learning models, and automatically monitor model predictions in production to help ensure they are not trending toward biased outcomes.

Future applications

The SageMaker Clarify science team is already looking to the future.

Their research areas include algorithmic fairness and machine learning, as well as explainable AI. Team members have published widely in the academic literature on these topics, and worked hard in the development of SageMaker Clarify to balance the science of fairness with engineering solutions and practical product design. Their approaches are both statistical and causal, and focus not only on bias measurement in trained models, but also bias mitigation. It is that last part that has Kearns particularly excited about the future.

“The ability to not just identify problems in your models, but also have the tools to train them in a different way would go a long way toward mitigating that bias,” he said. “It’s good to know that you have a problem, but it's even better to have a solution to your problem.”

Best practices

The notions of bias and fairness are highly application dependent and the choice of the attributes for which bias is to be measured, as well as the choice of the bias metrics, may need to be guided by social, legal, and other non-technical considerations,” said principal applied scientist Krishnaram Kenthapadi, who led the scientific effort behind SageMaker Clarify. “For successful adoption of fairness-aware machine learning and explainable AI approaches in practice, it’s important to build consensus and achieve collaboration across key stakeholders such as product, policy, legal, engineering, and AI/ML teams, as well as end users and communities,” he said. “Further, it’s good to take into account fairness and explainability considerations during each stage of the ML lifecycle, for example, Problem Formation, Dataset Construction, Algorithm Selection, Model Training Process, Testing Process, Deployment, and Monitoring/Feedback.

Find more best practices on the AWS website.

Research areas

Related content

GB, MLN, Edinburgh
We’re looking for a Machine Learning Scientist in the Personalization team for our Edinburgh office experienced in generative AI and large models. You will be responsible for developing and disseminating customer-facing personalized recommendation models. This is a hands-on role with global impact working with a team of world-class engineers and scientists across the Edinburgh offices and wider organization. You will lead the design of machine learning models that scale to very large quantities of data, and serve high-scale low-latency recommendations to all customers worldwide. You will embody scientific rigor, designing and executing experiments to demonstrate the technical efficacy and business value of your methods. You will work alongside a science team to delight customers by aiding in recommendations relevancy, and raise the profile of Amazon as a global leader in machine learning and personalization. Successful candidates will have strong technical ability, focus on customers by applying a customer-first approach, excellent teamwork and communication skills, and a motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. Our position offers exceptional opportunities for every candidate to grow their technical and non-technical skills. If you are selected, you have the opportunity to make a difference to our business by designing and building state of the art machine learning systems on big data, leveraging Amazon’s vast computing resources (AWS), working on exciting and challenging projects, and delivering meaningful results to customers world-wide. Key job responsibilities Develop machine learning algorithms for high-scale recommendations problems. Rapidly design, prototype and test many possible hypotheses in a high-ambiguity environment, making use of both quantitative analysis and business judgement. Collaborate with software engineers to integrate successful experimental results into large-scale, highly complex Amazon production systems capable of handling 100,000s of transactions per second at low latency. Report results in a manner which is both statistically rigorous and compellingly relevant, exemplifying good scientific practice in a business environment.
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video technologist, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! In Prime Video READI, our mission is to automate infrastructure scaling and operational readiness. We are growing a team specialized in time series modeling, forecasting, and release safety. This team will invent and develop algorithms for forecasting multi-dimensional related time series. The team will develop forecasts on key business dimensions with optimization recommendations related to performance and efficiency opportunities across our global software environment. As a founding member of the core team, you will apply your deep coding, modeling and statistical knowledge to concrete problems that have broad cross-organizational, global, and technology impact. Your work will focus on retrieving, cleansing and preparing large scale datasets, training and evaluating models and deploying them to production where we continuously monitor and evaluate. You will work on large engineering efforts that solve significantly complex problems facing global customers. You will be trusted to operate with complete independence and are often assigned to focus on areas where the business and/or architectural strategy has not yet been defined. You must be equally comfortable digging in to business requirements as you are drilling into design with development teams and developing production ready learning models. You consistently bring strong, data-driven business and technical judgment to decisions. You will work with internal and external stakeholders, cross-functional partners, and end-users around the world at all levels. Our team makes a big impact because nothing is more important to us than delivering for our customers, continually earning their trust, and thinking long term. You are empowered to bring new technologies to your solutions. If you crave a sense of ownership, this is the place to be.
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
IN, HR, Gurugram
We're on a journey to build something new a green field project! Come join our team and build new discovery and shopping products that connect customers with their vehicle of choice. We're looking for a talented Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of product managers, designers, and engineers to design, and build innovative automotive-shopping experiences for our customers. This is a great opportunity for an experienced engineer to design and implement the technology for a new Amazon business. We are looking for a Applied Scientist to design, implement and deliver end-to-end solutions. We are seeking passionate, hands-on, experienced and seasoned Senior Applied Scientist who will be deep in code and algorithms; who are technically strong in building scalable computer vision machine learning systems across item understanding, pose estimation, class imbalanced classifiers, identification and segmentation.. You will drive ideas to products using paradigms such as deep learning, semi supervised learning and dynamic learning. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will also help lead and mentor our team of applied scientists and engineers. You will take on complex customer problems, distill customer requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research or utilize your own out-of-the-box but pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you will directly contribute to implementation while you lead. A successful candidate has excellent technical depth, scientific vision, project management skills, great communication skills, and a drive to achieve results in a unified team environment. You should enjoy the process of solving real-world problems that, quite frankly, haven’t been solved at scale anywhere before. Along the way, we guarantee you’ll get opportunities to be a bold disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver—someone who truly enables AI and robotics to significantly impact the lives of millions of consumers. Key job responsibilities Architect, design, and implement Machine Learning models for vision systems on robotic platforms Optimize, deploy, and support at scale ML models on the edge. Influence the team's strategy and contribute to long-term vision and roadmap. Work with stakeholders across , science, and operations teams to iterate on design and implementation. Maintain high standards by participating in reviews, designing for fault tolerance and operational excellence, and creating mechanisms for continuous improvement. Prototype and test concepts or features, both through simulation and emulators and with live robotic equipment Work directly with customers and partners to test prototypes and incorporate feedback Mentor other engineer team members. A day in the life - 6+ years of building machine learning models for retail application experience - PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience - Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language - Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning - Demonstrated expertise in computer vision and machine learning techniques.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal systems. You will support projects that work on technologies including multi-modal model alignment, moderation systems and evaluation. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will support the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). You are also expected to publish in top tier conferences. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems. Specifically, we focus on model alignment with an aim to maintain safety while not denting utility, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to re-invent how millions of people consume video content on their TVs, Tablets and Alexa? We are building a free to watch streaming service called Fire TV Channels (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/21/amazon-launches-fire-tv-channels-app-400-fast-channels/). Our goal is to provide customers with a delightful and personalized experience for consuming content across News, Sports, Cooking, Gaming, Entertainment, Lifestyle and more. You will work closely with engineering and product stakeholders to realize our ambitious product vision. You will get to work with Generative AI and other state of the art technologies to help build personalization and recommendation solutions from the ground up. You will be in the driver's seat to present customers with content they will love. Using Amazon’s large-scale computing resources, you will ask research questions about customer behavior, build state-of-the-art models to generate recommendations and run these models to enhance the customer experience. You will participate in the Amazon ML community and mentor Applied Scientists and Software Engineers with a strong interest in and knowledge of ML. Your work will directly benefit customers and you will measure the impact using scientific tools.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, KA, Bangalore
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video technologist, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As a highly experienced and seasoned science leader, you will apply state of the art natural language processing and computer vision research to video centric digital media, while also responsible for creating and maintaining the best environment for applied science in order to recruit, retain and develop top talent. You will lead the research direction for a team of deeply talented applied scientists, creating the roadmaps for forward-looking research and communicate them effectively to senior leadership. You will also hire and develop applied scientists - growing the team to meet the evolving needs of our customers.