The company that markets Compas says its formula is a trade secret.“The key to our product is the algorithms, and they’re proprietary,” one of its executives said last year. “We’ve created them, and we don’t release them because it’s certainly a core piece of our business.”
Again, this goes back to the same issue of protecting algorithms for business purposes, but that also has implications for legal settings. In the near future, I predict that there will be a better, more legitimate way to validate wha these algorithms look at from a third party point of view.