ECAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper
A Comprehensive Sustainable Framework for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
- Roberto Pagliari
- Peter Hill
- Po-Yu Chen
- Maciej Dabrowny
- Tingsheng Tan
- Francois Buet-Golfouse
In many applications, regulations or best practices often lead to specific requirements in machine learning relating to four key pillars: fairness, privacy, interpretability and greenhouse gas emissions. These all sit in the broader context of sustainability in AI, an emerging practical AI topic. However, although these pillars have been individually addressed by past literature, none of these works have considered all the pillars. There are inherent trade-offs between each of the pillars (for example, utility vs fairness or utility vs privacy), making it even more important to consider them together. This paper outlines a new framework for Sustainable Machine Learning. It proposes FPIG, a general AI pipeline that allows for simultaneous consideration and a better understanding of the tradeoffs between the pillars. Based on the FPIG framework, we propose a meta-learning algorithm to estimate the four key pillars given a dataset summary, model architecture, and hyperparameters before model training. This algorithm allows users to select the optimal model architecture for a given dataset and a set of user requirements on the pillars. We illustrate the trade-offs under the FPIG model on three classical datasets and demonstrate the meta-learning approach with an example of real-world datasets and models with different interpretability, showcasing how it can aid model selection.