Suspicion Machines

Summary

Landmark investigation obtaining full access to Rotterdam's algorithm source code, model file, and training data. Found systematic discrimination based on ethnicity, age, gender, and parenthood. Revealed the system was a Gradient Boosting Machine with 500 decision trees processing 315 input variables, trained on 12,707 past investigations. Documented that the system performed little better than random selection. Rotterdam was the only European city to provide complete algorithmic transparency.