Democratize with Care: The need for fairness specific features in user-interface based open source AutoML tools

AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in businesses and organizations, impacting the outcomes and interests of human users. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) streamlines the machine learning model development process by automating repetitive tasks and making data-driven decisions, enabling even non-experts to construct high-quality models efficiently. This democratization allows more users (including non-experts) to access and utilize state-of-the-art machine-learning expertise. However, AutoML tools may also propagate bias in the way these tools handle the data, model choices, and optimization approaches adopted. We conducted an experimental study of User-interface-based open source AutoML tools (DataRobot, H2O Studio, Dataiku, and Rapidminer Studio) to examine if they had features to assist users in developing fairness-aware machine learning models. The experiments covered the following considerations for the evaluation of features: understanding use case context, data representation, feature relevance and sensitivity, data bias and preprocessing techniques, data handling capabilities, training-testing split, hyperparameter handling, and constraints, fairness-oriented model development, explainability and ability to download and edit models by the user. The results revealed inadequacies in features that could support in fairness-aware model development. Further, the results also highlight the need to establish certain essential features for promoting fairness in AutoML tools.