We address the problem of algorithmic fairness: ensuring that sensitive variables do not unfairly influence the outcome of a classifier. We present an approach based on empirical risk minimization, which incorporates a fairness constraint into the learning problem. It encourages the conditional risk of the learned classifier to be approximately constant with respect to the sensitive variable. We derive both risk and fairness bounds that support the statistical consistency of our approach. We specify our approach to kernel methods and observe that the fairness requirement implies an orthogonality constraint which can be easily added to these methods. We further observe that for linear models the constraint translates into a simple data preprocessing step. Experiments indicate that the method is empirically effective and performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches.
University of Genova（热那亚大学）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
We tackle the problem of algorithmic fairness, where the goal is to avoid the unfairly influence of sensitive information, in the general context of regression with possible continuous sensitive attributes. We extend the framework of fair empirical risk minimization to this general scenario, covering in this way the whole standard supervised learning setting. Our generalized fairness measure reduces to well known notions of fairness available in literature. We derive learning guarantees for our method, that imply in particular its statistical consistency, both in terms of the risk and the fair…
Machine learning models (e.g., speech recognizers) are usually trained to minimize average loss, which results in representation disparity---minority groups (e.g., non-native speakers) contribute less to the training objective and thus tend to suffer higher loss. Worse, as model accuracy affects user retention, a minority group can shrink over time. In this paper, we first show that the status quo of empirical risk minimization (ERM) amplifies representation disparity over time, which can even make initially fair models unfair. To mitigate this, we develop an approach based on distributionally…
PAC-Bayesian Generalization Guarantees for Fairness on Stochastic and Deterministic Classifiers
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institut d Optique Graduate School（高等光学学院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Institut Universitaire de France（法国大学研究院）；Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；Univ Rennes（雷恩大学）
Differential privacy is concerned about the prediction quality while measuring the privacy impact on individuals whose information is contained in the data. We consider differentially private risk minimization problems with regularizers that induce structured sparsity. These regularizers are known to be convex but they are often non-differentiable. We analyze the standard differentially private algorithms, such as output perturbation, Frank-Wolfe and objective perturbation. Output perturbation is a differentially private algorithm that is known to perform well for minimizing risks that are str…
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
This paper proves, in very general settings, that convex risk minimization is a procedure to select a unique conditional probability model determined by the classification problem. Unlike most previous work, we give results that are general enough to include cases in which no minimum exists, as occurs typically, for instance, with standard boosting algorithms. Concretely, we first show that any sequence of predictors minimizing convex risk over the source distribution will converge to this unique model when the class of predictors is linear (but potentially of infinite dimension). Secondly, we…
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
This paper extends the standard chaining technique to prove excess risk upper bounds for empirical risk minimization with random design settings even if the magnitude of the noise and the estimates is unbounded. The bound applies to many loss functions besides the squared loss, and scales only with the sub-Gaussian or subexponential parameters without further statistical assumptions such as the bounded kurtosis condition over the hypothesis class. A detailed analysis is provided for slope constrained and penalized linear least squares regression with a sub-Gaussian setting, which often proves …
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Barcelona Graduate School of Economics（巴塞罗那经济学院）
Empirical risk minimization is a standard principle for choosing algorithms in learning theory. In this paper we study the properties of empirical risk minimization for time series. The analysis is carried out in a general framework that covers different types of forecasting applications encountered in the literature. We are concerned with 1-step-ahead prediction of a univariate time series generated by a parameter-driven process. A class of recursive algorithms is available to forecast the time series. The algorithms are recursive in the sense that the forecast produced in a given period is a…
Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；Univ. Paris-Sud（巴黎南大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inria Saclay - Ile-de-France（法国国家信息与自动化研究所萨克莱-法兰西岛分院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
This paper investigates robust versions of the general empirical risk minimization algorithm, one of the core techniques underlying modern statistical methods. Success of the empirical risk minimization is based on the fact that for a "well-behaved" stochastic process $\left\{ f(X), \ f\in \mathcal F\right\}$ indexed by a class of functions $f\in \mathcal F$, averages $\frac{1}{N}\sum_{j=1}^N f(X_j)$ evaluated over a sample $X_1,\ldots,X_N$ of i.i.d. copies of $X$ provide good approximation to the expectations $\mathbb E f(X)$ uniformly over large classes $f\in \mathcal F$. However, this might…
Pairwise similarities and dissimilarities between data points might be easier to obtain than fully labeled data in real-world classification problems, e.g., in privacy-aware situations. To handle such pairwise information, an empirical risk minimization approach has been proposed, giving an unbiased estimator of the classification risk that can be computed only from pairwise similarities and unlabeled data. However, this direction cannot handle pairwise dissimilarities so far. On the other hand, semi-supervised clustering is one of the methods which can use both similarities and dissimilaritie…
We design simple screening tests to automatically discard data samples in empirical risk minimization without losing optimization guarantees. We derive loss functions that produce dual objectives with a sparse solution. We also show how to regularize convex losses to ensure such a dual sparsity-inducing property, and propose a general method to design screening tests for classification or regression based on ellipsoidal approximations of the optimal set. In addition to producing computational gains, our approach also allows us to compress a dataset into a subset of representative points.
Empirical risk minimization is perhaps the most influential idea in statistical learning, with applications to nearly all scientific and technical domains in the form of regression and classification models. To analyze massive streaming datasets in distributed computing environments, practitioners increasingly prefer to deploy regression models on edge rather than in the cloud. By keeping data on edge devices, we minimize the energy, communication, and data security risk associated with the model. Although it is equally advantageous to train models at the edge, a common assumption is that the …
We consider a general statistical learning problem where an unknown fraction of the training data is corrupted. We develop a robust learning method that only requires specifying an upper bound on the corrupted data fraction. The method minimizes a risk function defined by a non-parametric distribution with unknown probability weights. We derive and analyse the optimal weights and show how they provide robustness against corrupted data. Furthermore, we give a computationally efficient coordinate descent algorithm to solve the risk minimization problem. We demonstrate the wide range applicabilit…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is typically designed to perform well on the average loss, which can result in estimators that are sensitive to outliers, generalize poorly, or treat subgroups unfairly. While many methods aim to address these problems individually, in this work, we explore them through a unified framework -- tilted empirical risk minimization (TERM). In particular, we show that it is possible to flexibly tune the impact of individual losses through a straightforward extension to ERM using a hyperparameter called the tilt. We provide several interpretations of the resulting fr…
Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；Japan Science and Technology Agency（日本科学技术振兴机构）
We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging method with variance reduction. Our methods generate a sparser solution than the existing methods because we do not need to take the average of the history of the solutions. This is favorable in terms of both interpretability and generalization. Moreover, our methods have theoretical support for both a strongly and a non-strongly convex regularizer and achie…
Invariant Causal Prediction (Peters et al., 2016) is a technique for out-of-distribution generalization which assumes that some aspects of the data distribution vary across the training set but that the underlying causal mechanisms remain constant. Recently, Arjovsky et al. (2019) proposed Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM), an objective based on this idea for learning deep, invariant features of data which are a complex function of latent variables; many alternatives have subsequently been suggested. However, formal guarantees for all of these works are severely lacking. In this paper, we pres…
We study in this paper the consequences of using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as a measure of quality for regression models. We show that finding the best model under the MAPE is equivalent to doing weighted Mean Absolute Error (MAE) regression. We also show that, under some asumptions, universal consistency of Empirical Risk Minimization remains possible using the MAPE.
Empirical risk minimization is the main tool for prediction problems, but its extension to relational data remains unsolved. We solve this problem using recent ideas from graph sampling theory to (i) define an empirical risk for relational data and (ii) obtain stochastic gradients for this empirical risk that are automatically unbiased. This is achieved by considering the method by which data is sampled from a graph as an explicit component of model design. By integrating fast implementations of graph sampling schemes with standard automatic differentiation tools, we provide an efficient turnk…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Microsoft Research, New England（微软新英格兰研究院）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
We develop a family of accelerated stochastic algorithms that minimize sums of convex functions. Our algorithms improve upon the fastest running time for empirical risk minimization (ERM), and in particular linear least-squares regression, across a wide range of problem settings. To achieve this, we establish a framework based on the classical proximal point algorithm. Namely, we provide several algorithms that reduce the minimization of a strongly convex function to approximate minimizations of regularizations of the function. Using these results, we accelerate recent fast stochastic algorith…
State University of New York at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
In this paper we study the differentially private Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) problem in different settings. For smooth (strongly) convex loss function with or without (non)-smooth regularization, we give algorithms that achieve either optimal or near optimal utility bounds with less gradient complexity compared with previous work. For ERM with smooth convex loss function in high-dimensional ($p\gg n$) setting, we give an algorithm which achieves the upper bound with less gradient complexity than previous ones. At last, we generalize the expected excess empirical risk from convex loss fu…
University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田工业大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
We propose an adaptive (stochastic) gradient perturbation method for differentially private empirical risk minimization. At each iteration, the random noise added to the gradient is optimally adapted to the stepsize; we name this process adaptive differentially private (ADP) learning. Given the same privacy budget, we prove that the ADP method considerably improves the utility guarantee compared to the standard differentially private method in which vanilla random noise is added. Our method is particularly useful for gradient-based algorithms with time-varying learning rates, including variant…
We study the minimal error of the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) procedure in the task of regression, both in the random and the fixed design settings. Our sharp lower bounds shed light on the possibility (or impossibility) of adapting to simplicity of the model generating the data. In the fixed design setting, we show that the error is governed by the global complexity of the entire class. In contrast, in random design, ERM may only adapt to simpler models if the local neighborhoods around the regression function are nearly as complex as the class itself, a somewhat counter-intuitive concl…
Currently, machine learning plays an important role in the lives and individual activities of numerous people. Accordingly, it has become necessary to design machine learning algorithms to ensure that discrimination, biased views, or unfair treatment do not result from decision making or predictions made via machine learning. In this work, we introduce a novel empirical risk minimization (ERM) framework for supervised learning, neutralized ERM (NERM) that ensures that any classifiers obtained can be guaranteed to be neutral with respect to a viewpoint hypothesis. More specifically, given a vie…
We consider a high dimensional binary classification problem and construct a classification procedure by minimizing the empirical misclassification risk with a penalty on the number of selected features. We derive non-asymptotic probability bounds on the estimated sparsity as well as on the excess misclassification risk. In particular, we show that our method yields a sparse solution whose l0-norm can be arbitrarily close to true sparsity with high probability and obtain the rates of convergence for the excess misclassification risk. The proposed procedure is implemented via the method of mixe…
We consider a generic convex optimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization of linear predictors. The problem structure allows us to reformulate it as a convex-concave saddle point problem. We propose a stochastic primal-dual coordinate (SPDC) method, which alternates between maximizing over a randomly chosen dual variable and minimizing over the primal variable. An extrapolation step on the primal variable is performed to obtain accelerated convergence rate. We also develop a mini-batch version of the SPDC method which facilitates parallel computing, and an exten…
The purpose of this paper is to discuss empirical risk minimization when the losses are not necessarily bounded and may have a distribution with heavy tails. In such situations, usual empirical averages may fail to provide reliable estimates and empirical risk minimization may provide large excess risk. However, some robust mean estimators proposed in the literature may be used to replace empirical means. In this paper, we investigate empirical risk minimization based on a robust estimate proposed by Catoni. We develop performance bounds based on chaining arguments tailored to Catoni's mean es…
In this work, we establish risk bounds for the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) with both dependent and heavy-tailed data-generating processes. We do so by extending the seminal works of Mendelson [Men15, Men18] on the analysis of ERM with heavy-tailed but independent and identically distributed observations, to the strictly stationary exponentially $β$-mixing case. Our analysis is based on explicitly controlling the multiplier process arising from the interaction between the noise and the function evaluations on inputs. It allows for the interaction to be even polynomially heavy-tailed, whic…
A dynamical model consists of a continuous self-map $T: \mathcal{X} \to \mathcal{X}$ of a compact state space $\mathcal{X}$ and a continuous observation function $f: \mathcal{X} \to \mathbb{R}$. This paper considers the fitting of a parametrized family of dynamical models to an observed real-valued stochastic process using empirical risk minimization. The limiting behavior of the minimum risk parameters is studied in a general setting. We establish a general convergence theorem for minimum risk estimators and ergodic observations. We then study conditions under which empirical risk minimizatio…
We consider the classical statistical learning/regression problem, when the value of a real random variable Y is to be predicted based on the observation of another random variable X. Given a class of functions F and a sample of independent copies of (X, Y ), one needs to choose a function f from F such that f(X) approximates Y as well as possible, in the mean-squared sense. We introduce a new procedure, the so-called median-of-means tournament, that achieves the optimal tradeoff between accuracy and confidence under minimal assumptions, and in particular outperforms classical methods based on…
We present an argument based on the multidimensional and the uniform central limit theorems, proving that, under some geometrical assumptions between the target function $T$ and the learning class $F$, the excess risk of the empirical risk minimization algorithm is lower bounded by \[\frac{\mathbb{E}\sup_{q\in Q}G_q}{\sqrt{n}}δ,\] where $(G_q)_{q\in Q}$ is a canonical Gaussian process associated with $Q$ (a well chosen subset of $F$) and $δ$ is a parameter governing the oscillations of the empirical excess risk function over a small ball in $F$.
Let $\cF$ be a set of $M$ classification procedures with values in $[-1,1]$. Given a loss function, we want to construct a procedure which mimics at the best possible rate the best procedure in $\cF$. This fastest rate is called optimal rate of aggregation. Considering a continuous scale of loss functions with various types of convexity, we prove that optimal rates of aggregation can be either $((\log M)/n)^{1/2}$ or $(\log M)/n$. We prove that, if all the $M$ classifiers are binary, the (penalized) Empirical Risk Minimization procedures are suboptimal (even under the margin/low noise conditio…
In this paper, we deal with the data-driven selection of multidimensional and possibly anisotropic bandwidths in the general framework of kernel empirical risk minimization. We propose a universal selection rule, which leads to optimal adaptive results in a large variety of statistical models such as nonparametric robust regression and statistical learning with errors in variables. These results are stated in the context of smooth loss functions, where the gradient of the risk appears as a good criterion to measure the performance of our estimators. The selection rule consists of a comparison …
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Google（谷歌公司）
Ensuring that classifiers are non-discriminatory or fair with respect to a sensitive feature (e.g., race or gender) is a topical problem. Progress in this task requires fixing a definition of fairness, and there have been several proposals in this regard over the past few years. Several of these, however, assume either binary sensitive features (thus precluding categorical or real-valued sensitive groups), or result in non-convex objectives (thus adversely affecting the optimisation landscape). In this paper, we propose a new definition of fairness that generalises some existing proposals, whi…
Where machine-learned predictive risk scores inform high-stakes decisions, such as bail and sentencing in criminal justice, fairness has been a serious concern. Recent work has characterized the disparate impact that such risk scores can have when used for a binary classification task. This may not account, however, for the more diverse downstream uses of risk scores and their non-binary nature. To better account for this, in this paper, we investigate the fairness of predictive risk scores from the point of view of a bipartite ranking task, where one seeks to rank positive examples higher tha…
Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Pioneer Centre for AI（人工智能先锋中心）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Rigshospitalet（哥本哈根大学国立医院）
Recent work on algorithmic fairness has largely focused on the fairness of discrete decisions, or classifications. While such decisions are often based on risk score models, the fairness of the risk models themselves has received considerably less attention. Risk models are of interest for a number of reasons, including the fact that they communicate uncertainty about the potential outcomes to users, thus representing a way to enable meaningful human oversight. Here, we address fairness desiderata for risk score models. We identify the provision of similar epistemic value to different groups a…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；AXA（安盛集团）；Polish Academy of Science（波兰科学院）
The past few years have seen a dramatic rise of academic and societal interest in fair machine learning. While plenty of fair algorithms have been proposed recently to tackle this challenge for discrete variables, only a few ideas exist for continuous ones. The objective in this paper is to ensure some independence level between the outputs of regression models and any given continuous sensitive variables. For this purpose, we use the Hirschfeld-Gebelein-Rényi (HGR) maximal correlation coefficient as a fairness metric. We propose two approaches to minimize the HGR coefficient. First, by reduci…
In this work we formulate and formally characterize group fairness as a multi-objective optimization problem, where each sensitive group risk is a separate objective. We propose a fairness criterion where a classifier achieves minimax risk and is Pareto-efficient w.r.t. all groups, avoiding unnecessary harm, and can lead to the best zero-gap model if policy dictates so. We provide a simple optimization algorithm compatible with deep neural networks to satisfy these constraints. Since our method does not require test-time access to sensitive attributes, it can be applied to reduce worst-case cl…
We study conditional risk minimization (CRM), i.e. the problem of learning a hypothesis of minimal risk for prediction at the next step of sequentially arriving dependent data. Despite it being a fundamental problem, successful learning in the CRM sense has so far only been demonstrated using theoretical algorithms that cannot be used for real problems as they would require storing all incoming data. In this work, we introduce MACRO, a meta-algorithm for CRM that does not suffer from this shortcoming, but nevertheless offers learning guarantees. Instead of storing all data it maintains and ite…
We present a Bayesian view of counterfactual risk minimization (CRM) for offline learning from logged bandit feedback. Using PAC-Bayesian analysis, we derive a new generalization bound for the truncated inverse propensity score estimator. We apply the bound to a class of Bayesian policies, which motivates a novel, potentially data-dependent, regularization technique for CRM. Experimental results indicate that this technique outperforms standard $L_2$ regularization, and that it is competitive with variance regularization while being both simpler to implement and more computationally efficient.
Common fairness definitions in machine learning focus on balancing notions of disparity and utility. In this work, we study fairness in the context of risk disparity among sub-populations. We are interested in learning models that minimize performance discrepancies across sensitive groups without causing unnecessary harm. This is relevant to high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where non-maleficence is a core principle. We formalize this objective using Pareto frontiers, and provide analysis, based on recent works in fairness, to exemplify scenarios were perfect fairness might not be feasib…
We study the task of learning from non-i.i.d. data. In particular, we aim at learning predictors that minimize the conditional risk for a stochastic process, i.e. the expected loss of the predictor on the next point conditioned on the set of training samples observed so far. For non-i.i.d. data, the training set contains information about the upcoming samples, so learning with respect to the conditional distribution can be expected to yield better predictors than one obtains from the classical setting of minimizing the marginal risk. Our main contribution is a practical estimator for the condi…
We propose a general approach for supervised learning with structured output spaces, such as combinatorial and polyhedral sets, that is based on minimizing estimated conditional risk functions. Given a loss function defined over pairs of output labels, we first estimate the conditional risk function by solving a (possibly infinite) collection of regularized least squares problems. A prediction is made by solving an inference problem that minimizes the estimated conditional risk function over the output space. We show that this approach enables, in some cases, efficient training and inference w…
We introduce Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM), a learning paradigm to estimate invariant correlations across multiple training distributions. To achieve this goal, IRM learns a data representation such that the optimal classifier, on top of that data representation, matches for all training distributions. Through theory and experiments, we show how the invariances learned by IRM relate to the causal structures governing the data and enable out-of-distribution generalization.
Criteo AI Labs（Criteo人工智能实验室）；LTCI, Telecom ParisTech（巴黎高等电信学院LTCI实验室）；LPSM, Université Paris 6（巴黎第六大学LPSM实验室）
This manuscript introduces the idea of using Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) for the Counterfactual Risk Minimization (CRM) problem. Tapping into a rich existing literature, we show that DRO is a principled tool for counterfactual decision making. We also show that well-established solutions to the CRM problem like sample variance penalization schemes are special instances of a more general DRO problem. In this unifying framework, a variety of distributionally robust counterfactual risk estimators can be constructed using various probability distances and divergences as uncertainty …
Algorithmic fairness and privacy are essential pillars of trustworthy machine learning. Fair machine learning aims at minimizing discrimination against protected groups by, for example, imposing a constraint on models to equalize their behavior across different groups. This can subsequently change the influence of training data points on the fair model, in a disproportionate way. We study how this can change the information leakage of the model about its training data. We analyze the privacy risks of group fairness (e.g., equalized odds) through the lens of membership inference attacks: inferr…
MPI-SWS（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Cambridge University（剑桥大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
As algorithms are increasingly used to make important decisions that affect human lives, ranging from social benefit assignment to predicting risk of criminal recidivism, concerns have been raised about the fairness of algorithmic decision making. Most prior works on algorithmic fairness normatively prescribe how fair decisions ought to be made. In contrast, here, we descriptively survey users for how they perceive and reason about fairness in algorithmic decision making. A key contribution of this work is the framework we propose to understand why people perceive certain features as fair or u…
Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to help humans make decisions in high-stakes settings, such as medicine, criminal justice and education. In each of these cases, the purpose of the risk assessment tool is to inform actions, such as medical treatments or release conditions, often with the aim of reducing the likelihood of an adverse event such as hospital readmission or recidivism. Problematically, most tools are trained and evaluated on historical data in which the outcomes observed depend on the historical decision-making policy. These tools thus reflect risk under the histo…
