On the Readiness of Scientific Data Papers for a Fair and Transparent Use in Machine Learning

To ensure the fairness and trustworthiness of machine learning (ML) systems, recent legislative initiatives and relevant research in the ML community have pointed out the need to document the data used to train ML models. Besides, data-sharing practices in many scientific domains have evolved in rec...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Giner Miguelez, Joan, Gómez, Abel, Cabot, Jordi
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/423489
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/423489
https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04402-4
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:ML technologies
Machine learning systems
Training data
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Aprenentatge automàtic
Descripción
Sumario:To ensure the fairness and trustworthiness of machine learning (ML) systems, recent legislative initiatives and relevant research in the ML community have pointed out the need to document the data used to train ML models. Besides, data-sharing practices in many scientific domains have evolved in recent years for reproducibility purposes. In this sense, academic institutions’ adoption of these practices has encouraged researchers to publish their data and technical documentation in peer-reviewed publications such as data papers. In this study, we analyze how this broader scientific data documentation meets the needs of the ML community and regulatory bodies for its use in ML technologies. We examine a sample of 4041 data papers of different domains, assessing their coverage and trends in the requested dimensions and comparing them to those from an ML-focused venue (NeurIPS D&B), which publishes papers describing datasets. As a result, we propose a set of recommendation guidelines for data creators and scientific data publishers to increase their data’s preparedness for its transparent and fairer use in ML technologies.