Jenga - A Framework to Study the Impact of Data Errors on the Predictions of Machine Learning Models

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used to automate decision making in various domains. Almost all common ML models are susceptible to data errors in the serving data (for which the model makes predictions). Such errors frequently occur in practice, caused for example by program bugs in data preprocessing code or non-anticipated schema changes in external data sources. These errors can have devastating effects on the prediction quality of ML models and are, at the same time, hard to anticipate and capture. In order to empower data scientists to study the impact as well as mitigation techniques for data errors in ML models, we propose Jenga, a light-weight, open source experimentation library. Jenga allows its users to test their models for robustness against common data errors. Jenga contains an abstraction for prediction tasks based on a dataset and a model, an easily extendable set of synthethic data corruptions (e.g., for missing values, outliers, typos and noisy measurements) as well as evaluation functionality to experiment with different data corruptions. Jenga supports researchers and practitioners in the difficult task of data validation for ML applications. As a showcase for this, we discuss two use cases of Jenga: studying the robustness of a model against incomplete data, as well as automatically stress testing integrity constraints for ML data expressed with tensorflow data validation.

Publication
International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT)
Date
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