The U.S. Census Bureau has a mission “to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data about its people and economy.” To meet this mission, the bureau aims to perform highly accurate surveys. One method to increase this accuracy is to maintain a Master Address File (MAF) to ensure each residence is counted in the census. The Geography Division is implementing emerging technology to leverage satellite imagery to update the MAF through the Automated Change Detection Core (ACDC); utilizing machine learning to detect change in residences. This effort has implications to variations in counting and representation of people in the census and requires analysis of the performance to evaluate the model for bias: the systemic, statistical and computational, and human bias that is injected into the model at all steps in the design, testing, and deployment process. How do we systematically assess the performance of our models in order to investigate bias? How do we pave the way for new standards of practice in the Census Bureau and beyond?

To help address the problem outlined above, a tool was built to address several goals of the federal government's mission for AI and machine learning models: performance driven, transparent, accountable, understandable, and accurate. When used in the machine learning workflow of the ACDC, this tool ensures that decisions are made based on the performance of the model by reporting in a format that is understandable and readable to technical and non-technical stakeholders. This tool creates accountability for model authors to report on their efforts and to meet certain standards of performance as decided by their team. By implementing this tool, the ACDC and Geography Division become leaders in new documentation methods and pave the way for a more transparent and accountable U.S. Census Bureau in AI and machine learning.

A performance scorecard is a piece of documentation built to report a model’s metrics of performance for the entire model and across categories of interest. This is an emerging documentation tool in machine learning, currently in development by Microsoft Azure as a component of their Responsible AI dashboard. After a regression or classification model has been trained, the model author should generate a performance scorecard to evaluate the metrics of performance for the model and across categories of interest. The information provided should be evaluated to guide conversation on the performance of a model to investigate sources of bias. The scorecard should be re-run with new iterations of the model and shared with stakeholders in decisions regarding a model’s deployment.