Strategic ML: How to Learn With Data That ‘Behaves’

Machine learning is increasingly being used for tasks that require making predictions about humans. But humans are not your conventional input: they have goals, beliefs, and aspirations, and take action to promote their own interests. Given that standard learning methods are not designed to handle inputs that 'behave', a natural question is: how should we design learning systems when we know they will be deployed and used in social settings? This tutorial introduces strategic machine learning – a new and emerging subfield of machine learning that aims to develop a disciplined framework for learning under strategic user behavior. The working hypothesis of strategic ML is simple: users want things, and act to achieve them. Surprisingly, this basic truism is difficult to address within the conventional learning framework. The key challenge is that how users behave often depends on the learned decision rule itself; thus, strategic learning seeks to devise methods which are able to anticipate and accommodate such responsive behavior. Towards this, strategic ML offers a formalism for reasoning about strategic responses, for designing appropriate learning objectives, and for developing practical tools for learning in strategic environments. The tutorial will survey recent and ongoing work in this new domain, present key theoretical and empirical results, provide practical tools, and discuss open questions and landmark challenges.