In the field of predictive modeling for criminal justice applications, the dual challenges of ensuring fairness and maintaining interpretability are crucial. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a new approach to optimizing decision trees using evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Our approach focuses on refining decision trees to achieve a balance between accuracy and algorithmic fairness, a task complicated by potential bias present in historical data. By leveraging the principles of multi-objective optimization, our model systematically trades off prediction accuracy and fair-ness. The evolutionary process characterized by selection, crossover, and mutation is tailored to fit the decision tree structure, ensuring that model development is not only accurate but also promoting measurable fairness. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in providing interpretable and fair predictive models that can be considered for high-stakes applications in criminal justice. More broadly, this research makes a significant contribution to the field of explainable machine learning, providing a powerful framework for engineering systems that are transparent, fair, and adaptable to different data environments.

Biometric applications, such as person re-identification (ReID), are often deployed on energy constrained devices. While recent ReID methods prioritize high retrieval performance, they often come with large computational costs and high search time, rendering them less practical in real-world settings. In this work, we propose an input-adaptive network with multiple exit blocks, that can terminate computation early if the retrieval is straightforward or noisy, saving a lot of computation. To assess the complexity of the input, we introduce a temporal-based classifier driven by a new training strategy. Furthermore, we adopt a binary hash code generation approach instead of relying on continuous-valued features, which significantly improves the search process by a factor of 20. To ensure similarity preservation, we utilize a new ranking regularizer that bridges the gap between continuous and binary features. Extensive analysis of our proposed method is conducted on three datasets: Market1501, MSMT17 (Multi-Scene Multi-Time), and the BGC1 (BRIAR Government Collection). Using our approach, more than 70% of the samples with compact hash codes exit early on the Market1501 dataset, saving 80% of the networks computational cost and improving over other hash-based methods by 60%. These results demonstrate a significant improvement over dynamic networks and showcase comparable accuracy performance to conventional ReID methods.

While the use of machine learning techniques in high stake fields, such as medical diagnosis and criminal justice, has been increasing in recent years, concerns have been raised regarding the lack of transparency and interpretability of the algorithms used. In this paper, we propose the use of interpretable attention-based ConvLSTM models for crime forecasting application. This approach combines the power of ConvLSTM models in capturing spatio-temporal patterns with the interpretability of attention mechanisms, allowing for the identification of key geographic areas in the input data that contribute to the prediction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through experiments on real-world crime data, showing that our model demonstrates high accuracy in crime predictions while providing insightful visualization that enhances the interpretability of prediction results.

Machine learning applications related to high-stakes decisions are often surrounded by significant amounts of controversy. This has led to increasing interest in interpretable machine learning models. A well-known class of interpretable models is that of decision trees (DTs), which mirror a common strategy used by humans to arrive at solutions through a series of well-defined decisions. However, much of previous research on DTs for criminal justice predictions has focused primarily on collections (ensembles) of DTs whose results are aggregated together. Such DT ensembles are used to help improve accuracy; however, their increased complexity and deviation from human decision-making processes makes them much less interpretable compared to single-DT approaches. In this paper, we present a new DT model for criminal recidivism prediction that is designed with high interpretability, accuracy, and fairness as core objectives. The interpretability of the model stems from its formulation in terms of a single DT structure, while accuracy is achieved through an intensive optimization process of DT parameters that is carried out using a novel evolutionary algorithm. Through extensive experiments, we analyze the performance of our proposed EADTC (Evolutionary Algorithm Decision Tree for Crime prediction) method on relevant datasets. Our experiments show that the EADTC approach achieves competitive accuracy and fairness with respect to state-of-the-art ensemble DT models, while achieving higher interpretability due to the simpler, single-DT structure.

Dynamic dataflow models of computation have become widely used through their adoption to popular programming frameworks such as TensorFlow and GNU Radio. Although dynamic dataflow models offer more programming freedom, they lack analyzability compared to their static counterparts (such as synchronous dataflow). In this paper we advocate the use of a boundedly dynamic dataflow model of computation, VR-PRUNE, that remains analyzable but still offers more programming freedom than a fully static dataflow model. The paper presents the VR-PRUNE model of computation and runtime, and illustrates its applicability to practical signal processing applications by two use cases: an adaptive convolutional neural network, and a predistortion filter for wireless communications. By runtime experiments on two heterogeneous computing platforms we show that VR-PRUNE is both flexible and efficient.