Computers are increasingly used to make decisions that have significant impact in people's lives. Often, these predictions can affect different population subgroups disproportionately. As a result, the issue of fairness has received much recent interest, and a number of fairness-enhanced classifiers and predictors have appeared in the literature. This paper seeks to study the following questions: how do these different techniques fundamentally compare to one another, and what accounts for the differences? Specifically, we seek to bring attention to many under-appreciated aspects of such fairness-enhancing interventions. Concretely, we present the results of an open benchmark we have developed that lets us compare a number of different algorithms under a variety of fairness measures, and a large number of existing datasets. We find that although different algorithms tend to prefer specific formulations of fairness preservations, many of these measures strongly correlate with one another. In addition, we find that fairness-preserving algorithms tend to be sensitive to fluctuations in dataset composition (simulated in our benchmark by varying training-test splits), indicating that fairness interventions might be more brittle than previously thought.
QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company（QuantumBlack，麦肯锡旗下公司）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
Machine learning algorithms are extensively used to make increasingly more consequential decisions about people, so achieving optimal predictive performance can no longer be the only focus. A particularly important consideration is fairness with respect to race, gender, or any other sensitive attribute. This paper studies intersectional fairness, where intersections of multiple sensitive attributes are considered. Prior research has mainly focused on fairness with respect to a single sensitive attribute, with intersectional fairness being comparatively less studied despite its critical importa…
Criminal recidivism models are tools that have gained widespread adoption by parole boards across the United States to assist with parole decisions. These models take in large amounts of data about an individual and then predict whether an individual would commit a crime if released on parole. Although such models are not the only or primary factor in making the final parole decision, questions have been raised about their accuracy, fairness, and interpretability. In this paper, various machine learning-based criminal recidivism models are created based on a real-world parole decision dataset …
With language models becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it has become essential to address their inequitable treatment of diverse demographic groups and factors. Most research on evaluating and mitigating fairness harms has been concentrated on English, while multilingual models and non-English languages have received comparatively little attention. This paper presents a survey of fairness in multilingual and non-English contexts, highlighting the shortcomings of current research and the difficulties faced by methods designed for English. We contend that the multitude of diverse cultures and la…
Telecommunication Engineering Centre（电信工程中心）；Ministry of Communications（通信部）；Adobe Inc.（奥多比公司）；Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）
Decisions made by various Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems greatly influence our day-to-day lives. With the increasing use of AI systems, it becomes crucial to know that they are fair, identify the underlying biases in their decision-making, and create a standardized framework to ascertain their fairness. In this paper, we propose a novel Fairness Score to measure the fairness of a data-driven AI system and a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for issuing Fairness Certification for such systems. Fairness Score and audit process standardization will ensure quality, reduce ambiguity, enable …
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Although the fairness community has recognized the importance of data, researchers in the area primarily rely on UCI Adult when it comes to tabular data. Derived from a 1994 US Census survey, this dataset has appeared in hundreds of research papers where it served as the basis for the development and comparison of many algorithmic fairness interventions. We reconstruct a superset of the UCI Adult data from available US Census sources and reveal idiosyncrasies of the UCI Adult dataset that limit its external validity. Our primary contribution is a suite of new datasets derived from US Census su…
Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Free University Berlin（柏林自由大学）
As decision-making increasingly relies on Machine Learning (ML) and (big) data, the issue of fairness in data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems is receiving increasing attention from both research and industry. A large variety of fairness-aware machine learning solutions have been proposed which involve fairness-related interventions in the data, learning algorithms and/or model outputs. However, a vital part of proposing new approaches is evaluating them empirically on benchmark datasets that represent realistic and diverse settings. Therefore, in this paper, we overview real-world …
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）
We study the problem of best arm identification with a fairness constraint in a given causal model. The goal is to find a soft intervention on a given node to maximize the outcome while meeting a fairness constraint by counterfactual estimation with only partial knowledge of the causal model. The problem is motivated by ensuring fairness on an online marketplace. We provide theoretical guarantees on the probability of error and empirically examine the effectiveness of our algorithm with a two-stage baseline.
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；RAND Corporation（兰德公司）
Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization techniques have been proposed to aid with the choice of "peer leaders" or "influencers" in such interventions. Yet, traditional algorithms for influence maximization have not been designed with these interventions in mind. As a result, they may disproportionately exclude minority communities from the benefits of the intervention. This has motivated research on…
With the aim of building machine learning systems that incorporate standards of fairness and accountability, we explore explicit subgroup sample complexity bounds. The work is motivated by the observation that classifier predictions for real world datasets often demonstrate drastically different metrics, such as accuracy, when subdivided by specific sensitive variable subgroups. The reasons for these discrepancies are varied and not limited to the influence of mitigating variables, institutional bias, underlying population distributions as well as sampling bias. Among the numerous definitions …
The importance of incorporating ethics and legal compliance into machine-assisted decision-making is broadly recognized. Further, several lines of recent work have argued that critical opportunities for improving data quality and representativeness, controlling for bias, and allowing humans to oversee and impact computational processes are missed if we do not consider the lifecycle stages upstream from model training and deployment. Yet, very little has been done to date to provide system-level support to data scientists who wish to develop and deploy responsible machine learning methods. We a…
Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）
Decision-support systems are information systems that offer support to people's decisions in various applications such as judiciary, real-estate and banking sectors. Lately, these support systems have been found to be discriminatory in the context of many practical deployments. In an attempt to evaluate and mitigate these biases, algorithmic fairness literature has been nurtured using notions of comparative justice, which relies primarily on comparing two/more individuals or groups within the society that is supported by such systems. However, such a fairness notion is not very useful in the i…
The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Most approaches in algorithmic fairness constrain machine learning methods so the resulting predictions satisfy one of several intuitive notions of fairness. While this may help private companies comply with non-discrimination laws or avoid negative publicity, we believe it is often too little, too late. By the time the training data is collected, individuals in disadvantaged groups have already suffered from discrimination and lost opportunities due to factors out of their control. In the present work we focus instead on interventions such as a new public policy, and in particular, how to max…
Leibniz University, Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；L3S Research Center, Hannover（汉诺威L3S研究中心）
The wide spread usage of automated data-driven decision support systems has raised a lot of concerns regarding accountability and fairness of the employed models in the absence of human supervision. Existing fairness-aware approaches tackle fairness as a batch learning problem and aim at learning a fair model which can then be applied to future instances of the problem. In many applications, however, the data comes sequentially and its characteristics might evolve with time. In such a setting, it is counter-intuitive to "fix" a (fair) model over the data stream as changes in the data might inc…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Many instances of algorithmic bias are caused by distributional shifts. For example, machine learning (ML) models often perform worse on demographic groups that are underrepresented in the training data. In this paper, we leverage this connection between algorithmic fairness and distribution shifts to show that algorithmic fairness interventions can help ML models overcome distribution shifts, and that domain adaptation methods (for overcoming distribution shifts) can mitigate algorithmic biases. In particular, we show that (i) enforcing suitable notions of individual fairness (IF) can improve…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
In consequential decision-making applications, mitigating unwanted biases in machine learning models that yield systematic disadvantage to members of groups delineated by sensitive attributes such as race and gender is one key intervention to strive for equity. Focusing on demographic parity and equality of opportunity, in this paper we propose an algorithm that improves the fairness of a pre-trained classifier by simply dropping carefully selected training data points. We select instances based on their influence on the fairness metric of interest, computed using an infinitesimal jackknife-ba…
As the decisions made or influenced by machine learning models increasingly impact our lives, it is crucial to detect, understand, and mitigate unfairness. But even simply determining what "unfairness" should mean in a given context is non-trivial: there are many competing definitions, and choosing between them often requires a deep understanding of the underlying task. It is thus tempting to use model explainability to gain insights into model fairness, however existing explainability tools do not reliably indicate whether a model is indeed fair. In this work we present a new approach to expl…
We clarify what fairness guarantees we can and cannot expect to follow from unconstrained machine learning. Specifically, we characterize when unconstrained learning on its own implies group calibration, that is, the outcome variable is conditionally independent of group membership given the score. We show that under reasonable conditions, the deviation from satisfying group calibration is upper bounded by the excess risk of the learned score relative to the Bayes optimal score function. A lower bound confirms the optimality of our upper bound. Moreover, we prove that as the excess risk of the…
Tier Balancing: Towards Dynamic Fairness over Underlying Causal Factors
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Trilateral Research（三边研究公司）；Data Justice Lab, Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学数据正义实验室）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）
Fair machine learning works have been focusing on the development of equitable algorithms that address discrimination of certain groups. Yet, many of these fairness-aware approaches aim to obtain a unique solution to the problem, which leads to a poor understanding of the statistical limits of bias mitigation interventions. We present the first methodology that allows to explore those limits within a multi-objective framework that seeks to optimize any measure of accuracy and fairness and provides a Pareto front with the best feasible solutions. In this work, we focus our study on decision tre…
Simulations of infectious disease spread have long been used to understand how epidemics evolve and how to effectively treat them. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to understanding the fairness implications of different treatment strategies -- that is, how might such strategies distribute the expected disease burden differentially across various subgroups or communities in the population? In this work, we define the precision disease control problem -- the problem of optimally allocating vaccines in a social network in a step-by-step fashion -- and we use the ML Fairness G…
Leibniz University Hanover（莱布尼茨汉诺威大学）；L3S Research Center（L3S研究中心）
Automated decision making based on big data and machine learning (ML) algorithms can result in discriminatory decisions against certain protected groups defined upon personal data like gender, race, sexual orientation etc. Such algorithms designed to discover patterns in big data might not only pick up any encoded societal biases in the training data, but even worse, they might reinforce such biases resulting in more severe discrimination. The majority of thus far proposed fairness-aware machine learning approaches focus solely on the pre-, in- or post-processing steps of the machine learning …
