Folk
Folk provides easy access to datasets that can be used to benchmark machine learning algorithms. The goal of Folk is to facilitate and encourage work on fair machine learning among R users.
The Folk package has three key features:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
get_() | The get_() functions provide easy access to data. Currently, there is only one get_() function, get_acs(), which provides access to the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey’s
Public Use Microdata Sample. |
set_task() | The set_task() function preprocesses data for pre-defined prediction tasks. Pre-defined tasks can be viewed with show_tasks(). |
new_task() | The new_task() function allows users to create custom tasks. A custom task created via new_task() returns an object consistent with that returned by set_task(). |
Folk is inspired by the folktables Python package. For more information on folktables see Ding, Hardt, Miller, and Schmidt (2022), Retiring Adult: New Datasets for Fair Machine Learning. The pre-defined prediction tasks for the American Community Survey data are implementations of the tasks introduced in this paper.