2018

Model Cards for Model Reporting

Mitchell, Margaret, Wu, Simone, Zaldivar, Andrew et al.

Understand

Trained machine learning models are increasingly used to perform high-impact tasks in areas such as law enforcement, medicine, education, and employment.

  • In order to clarify the intended use cases of machine learning models and minimize their usage in contexts for which they are not well suited, we recommend that released models be accompanied by documentation detailing their performance characteristics.
  • In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting.
  • Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains.

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