MaryAnn's Blog

Hello! Full disclosure, last week's blog post contains information on some of the things I did this week. I wrote it with the conclusion in mind, so (I think) it sounds pretty well thought-out. However, last week's work did not go as smoothly as I wrote it to sound. For one, after I collected 11 different datasets on which to test our models, Caitlin realized that we weren't collecting the right kind of data. The datasets I chose didn't have a clear outcome variable (which I tried to write about in last week's post), but we definitely need one to test the models (or so we think). That wrench in our plans led Caitlin and I to having a long discussion about how the ranking actually works. We drew lots on the whiteboard, and then I went home and tried thinking through the process myself. The rest of this post is a walkthrough of my logic steps as to how an experiment like this might work. I started by thinking about scoring in the realm of statistical parity. Stati...

Welcome back me! I can't believe we are already halfway through this project. Over break, I was able to review some of my blog posts and notes. It was pretty amazing to see how this project has transformed. At the beginning, I had a vague idea of how research worked. I thought I would be reading about rankings and fairness and then magically solve the fairness problem for ranking with some pithy formulas. What I've realized, however, is that research, at least the type I've been doing, is an iterative process. We (Caitlin and I) would read fairness papers, discuss it, come up with an idea of what it means in ranking, try to explain it to our advisor, realize we don't understand fairness, and repeat. Two terms in, we have now identified three distinct fairness criteria to be applied to three different types of ranking problems. Now that we have a pretty good idea of the problem, we would like to apply it to some real data. The IQP team, Diana and the others (see diana....

I have no post this week on account of my final few days of winter break. Next week I will have a post. MaryAnn

I have no blog post this week on account of winter break from school. Happy New Year! MaryAnn