Machine learning about sexual orientation?
The central theme of our Calling Bullshit course is you don't always need to understand the technical details of a statistical analysis or computer algorithm to call bullshit on its use. As illustrated in the diagram below, there are typically several steps that people go through when they construct quantitative arguments. First, they assemble data that they use as inputs. Second, they feed these data into some the analytic machinery, represented below by the black box. Third, this machinery (ANOVAs, computational Bayesian analyses, deep learning algorithms, etc.) returns results of some sort. Sometimes these results are simply presented as-is, but often an interpretation is suggested as well.
Because these statistical or algorithmic black boxes are technically complex, they tend to scare off those who might otherwise challenge an argument. Most people do not have the graduate training in statistics or machine learning that they would need to fully understand the inner workings of the black box, and so they feel that they have no right to comment on the claims being made. But black boxes should not be deterrents. We argue that one doesn't need extensive technical training in order to think critically about even highly technical analyses.
When a quantitative claim is nonsense, we can usually figure this out without having to go into the technical details of the statistics or computer algorithms. Usually the problem arises because of some kind of bias or other problem with the data that is fed in, or because of some problem with the interpretation of the results that come out. Therefore, all we need to do is to clearly and carefully examine what is going into the black box, and what comes out. This way of thinking is extremely useful, because we won't always have the expertise necessary to evaluate the details of the technical analysis itself — and even if we do, such details are not always readily available. In this particular case study, we don't need to draw upon our experience using and teaching machine learning in order to form our critique.
In a video segment from the course, we describe the black box schema in further detail. In our case study on criminal machine learning, we look at the input side: how can biases in the data that get fed into a machine learning algorithm generate misleading results? In the present case study, we look at the output side: what interpretations or conclusions are reasonable from a given set of results? We address a recent study investigating the degree to which machine processing of facial images can be used to infer sexual orientation. We concede that we are expert neither in facial recognition technology nor in the developmental endocrinology of sexual orientation. However, we do have a bit of experience trying to thinking logically about the implications of experimental results, particularly in the areas of data science and biology.
Can deep learning reveal sexual orientation?
In early September 2017, the Economist and the Guardian released a pair of oddly credulous news stories about a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper describes a series of experiments that test whether a deep neural network can be trained to discern individuals' sexual orientations from their photographs. From an internet dating website, the authors selected photographs of nearly 8000 men and nearly 7000 women, equally distributed between heterosexual and homosexual orientations. They find that not only can their algorithm predict sexual orientation better than chance; it can outperform human judgement. That said, the performance of the algorithm is far from perfect1 .
Interpretation of the results
For obvious reasons, this paper attracted a large amount of attention from traditional and social media alike. Commentators particularly questioned the ethical implications of conducting such a study given that stigma against homosexuality remains widespread in the US and given that homosexuality is punishable by penalties up to and including death elsewhere. While we don't find the authors' defense particularly compelling (they "merely bolted together software and data that are readily available" — maybe so, but most inhumane technologies are created this way), we do not wish to address the ethical components of the work. We will let other more qualified scholars criticize the authors' "hermetic resistance to any contributions from the fields of sociology, cultural anthropology, feminism, or LGBT studies." We will take will take the authors at face value when they claim to have thought carefully about whether or not to publish the study, and we will assume they have the best of intentions. While the initial news reports did a dismal job of explaining how accurate the algorithm is, the original research paper is pretty clear and we do not aim to question the authors' methods here. In other words, we will assume that their input data are reasonable and that the black box is functioning as it should. We will assume that the technical aspects of their neural network represent reasonable choices for the problem, implemented correctly. We will set aside issues associated with a binary classification of sexual orientation. We will also take their raw results as correct. We will assume that their algorithm performs as reported, and that the study could be replicated on an independent sample of similar size.
So what is left to criticize? The authors' conclusions and interpretation of their results. First, the authors infer that the computer is picking up on features that humans are unable to detect. Second, the authors suggest that these features are the results of prenatal hormone exposure. Neither inference is warranted. We discuss these in turn.
Claim 1: The computer can detect features that humans cannot
The authors find that their deep neural network does a better job of guessing sexual orientation based on facial photographs than do humans solicited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Based on this result, they argue that the neural net is picking up on features that humans are unable to detect. The first line of their abstract proclaims "We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain". The first line of the Conclusions section repeats the assertion: "The findings reported in this work show that our faces contain more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived or interpreted by the human brain."
While the results are consistent with this claim, they do not come anywhere near demonstrating it. Indeed, there is a more parsimonious explanation for why the neural net outperforms humans at this classification task: it's not a fair contest. For one thing, the authors have pitted a trained algorithm against untrained human judges. The machine had thousands of images to learn from; the humans didn't get any practice at this specific task whatsoever. More importantly, humans are notoriously bad at aggregating information to update prior probabilities, whereas computational learning algorithms can do this sort of thing very well.
To illustrate, let's look an hypothetical experiment. Imagine that we provide a machine learning algorithm with a camera feed showing a blackjack table, and instruct it to learn how to play this casino game. Blackjack is not hard (if we ignore the challenges of card counting) and a standard learning algorithm could quickly infer reasonably good rules-of-thumb for playing. Once we have trained our learning algorithm, we compare the performance of the computer to the performance of humans recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk2 .
Suppose we find that the computer performs substantially better than do the humans. What can we conclude? One might conjecture that the machine can see some facet of the undealt cards that people cannot. Perhaps it is picking up information from the back of the face-down card atop the dealer's deck, for example. But notice that we are asking the computer and the humans to do two separate things: (1) detect cues in the photograph of the game table, and (2) make good decisions about what to do given these cues. With their excellent visual systems and pattern detection abilities, humans are very good at the former task. But it is well established that we humans are terrible at the latter task, namely making probabilistic decisions based on partial information. Thus it would be silly to conclude from this experiment that the cards are somehow marked in a way that a machine but not a human can detect. Obviously the untrained humans are simply making stupid bets.
A parallel situation arises when we ask a computer or a human to determine which of two people is more likely to be gay. As a human, we receive all sorts of information from the photographs. Rather than trying to decide whether to hit or stand given that you're holding a jack and a four while the dealer is showing a six3, we might see that one person has a baseball cap while the other wears full sideburns. Each of these facts shifts our probability estimate of the subjects' sexual orientations, but how much? And how do multiple facts interact? If the subject has a baseball cap but is clean-shaven with glasses, how does that shift our belief about the subject's orientation? Humans are terrible at these sorts of calculations, and moreover the humans in the study are untrained. Yet they are expected to compete against a computer algorithm which can be very good at these calculations, and which has been trained extensively.
It is no surprise whatsoever that naive humans do poorly at this task compared to a trained algorithm. There is absolutely no need to postulate secret features below the threshold of human detection. Doing so is a profound violation of the principle of parsimony.
Claim 2: The differences the computer picks up are due to prenatal hormone exposure.
After concluding that the computer is picking up cues that go undetected by humans, Wang and Kosinski set out to explore what these cues might be. They note that the faces of people with homosexual and heterosexual orientation have slightly different contours on average, as illustrated in their Figure 4, reproduced below.
From this finding the authors make an inferential leap that we consider unfounded and non-parsimonious. In the abstract of their paper, Wang and Kosinski write "Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology...." In their conclusion, "Our results provide strong support for the PHT, which argues that same-gender sexual orientation stems from the underexposure of male fetuses and overexposure of female fetuses to prenatal androgens responsible for the sexual differentiation of faces, preferences, and behavior." But have they shown anything of the sort? The sum total of their evidence in this direction is the slight difference in facials structures inferred by the learning algorithm and illustrated above. When we look at it, though, this evidence is quite weak.
First note that the authors are not anywhere near a rigorous experimental protocol demonstrating morphological differences under controlled conditions. The gold standard might be doing the morphometrics under laboratory conditions; here we are at least two steps away, using machine learning to infer average facial structures based upon self-selected photographs on a dating site. Any number of factors other than innate differences in facial structure could be involved, ranging from grooming to photo choice to lighting to weight and diet.
The use of dating site photos instead of three-dimensional morphometrics in the lab may not be the biggest problem with this claim. The authors argue that the faces of homosexual and heterosexual individuals have different shapes — but they never provide any sort of statistical test to demonstrate a significant difference. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim that homosexual and heterosexual people have differently shaped faces is an extraordinary claim. The authors cite no scientific studies that provide direct evidence for this claim based on 3D measurements, and while some studies relate physiognomy with perceived sexual orientation, we are unaware of work that associates actual orientation with fixed aspects of physiognomy. Rather than providing direct evidence for this claim, the authors present us with the observation that the facial contours inferred by the deep neural net look a bit different. At the very least, the authors would need to show a statistically significant difference between face shapes. To their credit, we do get confidence limits that exclude zero on the Pearson correlation coefficient between "facial femininity" and probability of having a homosexual orientation (p.24), but this seems to be several steps removed from a direct statistical test for specific differences in facial features.
Again an imaginary experiment can put help put this into context. Suppose that we were to hypothesize that born-again Christians are perfused with the light of the Holy Spirit. Humans have a hard time detecting this, we might conjecture, but machine vision may be able to discern these differences that lie below human perceptual thresholds. To test this hypothesis, we train a deep neural net to predict whether individuals are born-again Christians or not, based upon Facebook photographs. Imagine we find that not only is the neural net able to predict whether people are Christian far better than chance, but also that the algorithm picks up differences in facial illumination between born-again Christians and others.
What should we conclude from this? We might conclude that we have good evidence for the light of the Holy Spirit, but to do so would be a spectacular violation of Occam's razor on our part. All we really know is that a deep neural net can draw a distinction between these two groups for reasons that we don't really understand. The parsimonious explanation is of course that these groups present themselves differently on Facebook, whether in terms of grooming or facial expressions or photographic style or whatever else. The Holy Spirit hypothesis is clearly an extraordinary claim and we're nowhere near providing the sort of evidence that would be required to take it seriously.
Obviously the hypothesis that prenatal hormone exposure influences both facial structure and sexual orientation is somewhat less outlandish. But how much less? We know of no empirical studies that demonstrate any association between facial structure and sexual orientation, and we see little about the present paper that changes this degree of support. Yet in the news articles and to a degree in the research paper itself, the authors claim that their results strongly support the prenatal hormone exposure theory. For example, they argue that "the results show that the faces of gay men were more feminine and the faces of lesbians were more masculine than those of their respective heterosexual counterparts". Yet we see little reason to suppose this is due to physiognomy rather than various aspects of self-presentation. Surely the latter—which we know operates—is more the parsimonious explanation.
Conclusions
To summarize, the Wang and Kosinski paper is consistent with the possibility that computers can detect facial features that humans cannot, and it is consistent with the hypothesis that facial differences associated with sexual orientation arise through differences in prenatal hormone exposure. These are two extremely strong claims, however, and we consider neither particularly likely a priori. Thus we diverge from the authors in our interpretation of their results. We suspect the most likely explanation for their findings is that untrained humans are poor at integrating multiple cues to make good probabilistic estimates, and that sexual orientation influences grooming and self-presentation. Both of these are well-known facts; the former can explain why the neural network outperforms humans and the latter can explain why the neural network performs substantially better than chance. To invoke mysterious features below the threshold of human perception, or effects of prenatal hormone exposure on facial structure, is to abuse the principle of parsimony.
In the author notes provided to accompany the paper and on Twitter, Wang and Kosinski have expressed the hope that their results turn out to be wrong. We are not questioning their results, but do think they are mistaken in some of their interpretations. We hope that our commentary will offer them some measure of solace.
Note regarding author's response: As is our custom, we have reached out to the authors of this piece offering them with the opportunity to respond here. We have been in conversation by email and look forward to posting their response here should they choose to write one.
Endnotes
1 The authors measure discriminability using the area under the ROC curve (i.e., the AUC score), which they describe not-quite-accurately as "accuracy". In the best case, for men with five photographs, AUC reaches 0.91. For women with only a single photograph, AUC drops to 0.71.
2 One might object that blackjack is a two-player game, not a decision to be made by a single individual. But this is why we chose blackjack from among all other card games. As played on the gambling floor, blackjack is a decision problem under uncertainty rather than a game in the game-theoretic sense. The player plays only against a dealer, and the dealer's moves under every possible circumstance are all prescribed in advance by the rules of the game.
3 Stand.