Algorithmic fairness has attracted significant attention in recent years, with many quantitative measures suggested for characterizing the fairness of different machine learning algorithms. Despite this interest, the robustness of those fairness measures with respect to an intentional adversarial attack has not been properly addressed. Indeed, most adversarial machine learning has focused on the impact of malicious attacks on the accuracy of the system, without any regard to the system's fairness. We propose new types of data poisoning attacks where an adversary intentionally targets the fairness of a system. Specifically, we propose two families of attacks that target fairness measures. In the anchoring attack, we skew the decision boundary by placing poisoned points near specific target points to bias the outcome. In the influence attack on fairness, we aim to maximize the covariance between the sensitive attributes and the decision outcome and affect the fairness of the model. We conduct extensive experiments that indicate the effectiveness of our proposed attacks.
Data-driven predictive models are increasingly used in education to support students, instructors, and administrators. However, there are concerns about the fairness of the predictions and uses of these algorithmic systems. In this introduction to algorithmic fairness in education, we draw parallels to prior literature on educational access, bias, and discrimination, and we examine core components of algorithmic systems (measurement, model learning, and action) to identify sources of bias and discrimination in the process of developing and deploying these systems. Statistical, similarity-based…
Algorithmic Fairness in AI Surrogates for End-of-Life Decision-Making
The Department of Computing & Software Systems University of Washington Bothell Harborview Medical Center, UW Medicine（计算与软件系统系华盛顿大学Bothell分校哈佛湾医疗中心，华盛顿大学医学部）
针对临终决策 AI 替代者，本文将主要公平概念映射到现实临终场景并跨道德传统考察，提出公平应包含道德代表性及对患者价值观、关系与世界观的忠实。
Conventional algorithmic fairness is West-centric, as seen in its sub-groups, values, and methods. In this paper, we de-center algorithmic fairness and analyse AI power in India. Based on 36 qualitative interviews and a discourse analysis of algorithmic deployments in India, we find that several assumptions of algorithmic fairness are challenged. We find that in India, data is not always reliable due to socio-economic factors, ML makers appear to follow double standards, and AI evokes unquestioning aspiration. We contend that localising model fairness alone can be window dressing in India, whe…
RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences（GESIS - 莱布尼茨社会科学研究所）
Measures of algorithmic fairness often do not account for human perceptions of fairness that can substantially vary between different sociodemographics and stakeholders. The FairCeptron framework is an approach for studying perceptions of fairness in algorithmic decision making such as in ranking or classification. It supports (i) studying human perceptions of fairness and (ii) comparing these human perceptions with measures of algorithmic fairness. The framework includes fairness scenario generation, fairness perception elicitation and fairness perception analysis. We demonstrate the FairCept…
New York University（纽约大学）；Surveillance Technology Oversight Project（监控技术监督项目）
In this work we use Equal Oppportunity (EO) doctrines from political philosophy to make explicit the normative judgements embedded in different conceptions of algorithmic fairness. We contrast formal EO approaches that narrowly focus on fair contests at discrete decision points, with substantive EO doctrines that look at people's fair life chances more holistically over the course of a lifetime. We use this taxonomy to provide a moral interpretation of the impossibility results as the incompatibility between different conceptions of a fair contest -- foward-looking versus backward-looking -- w…
An increasing number of decisions regarding the daily lives of human beings are being controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in spheres ranging from healthcare, transportation, and education to college admissions, recruitment, provision of loans and many more realms. Since they now touch on many aspects of our lives, it is crucial to develop AI algorithms that are not only accurate but also objective and fair. Recent studies have shown that algorithmic decision-making may be inherently prone to unfairness, even when there is no intention for it. This paper presents an overview o…
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Algorithmic fairness is typically studied from the perspective of predictions. Instead, here we investigate fairness from the perspective of recourse actions suggested to individuals to remedy an unfavourable classification. We propose two new fairness criteria at the group and individual level, which -- unlike prior work on equalising the average group-wise distance from the decision boundary -- explicitly account for causal relationships between features, thereby capturing downstream effects of recourse actions performed in the physical world. We explore how our criteria relate to others, su…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Claudius Legal Intelligence（克劳迪乌斯法律智能公司）
The need to address representation biases and sentencing disparities in legal case data has long been recognized. Here, we study the problem of identifying and measuring biases in large-scale legal case data from an algorithmic fairness perspective. Our approach utilizes two regression models: A baseline that represents the decisions of a "typical" judge as given by the data and a "fair" judge that applies one of three fairness concepts. Comparing the decisions of the "typical" judge and the "fair" judge allows for quantifying biases across demographic groups, as we demonstrate in four case st…
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校）
What is the best way to define algorithmic fairness? While many definitions of fairness have been proposed in the computer science literature, there is no clear agreement over a particular definition. In this work, we investigate ordinary people's perceptions of three of these fairness definitions. Across two online experiments, we test which definitions people perceive to be the fairest in the context of loan decisions, and whether fairness perceptions change with the addition of sensitive information (i.e., race of the loan applicants). Overall, one definition (calibrated fairness) tends to …
Imputation Strategies Under Clinical Presence: Impact on Algorithmic Fairness
MRC Biostatistics Unit（MRC生物统计学单元）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（阿兰·图灵研究所）；McCombs School of Business（麦库姆斯商学院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Rady School of Management（雷迪管理学院）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）
Across machine learning (ML) sub-disciplines, researchers make explicit mathematical assumptions in order to facilitate proof-writing. We note that, specifically in the area of fairness-accuracy trade-off optimization scholarship, similar attention is not paid to the normative assumptions that ground this approach. Such assumptions presume that 1) accuracy and fairness are in inherent opposition to one another, 2) strict notions of mathematical equality can adequately model fairness, 3) it is possible to measure the accuracy and fairness of decisions independent from historical context, and 4)…
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf（海因里希·海涅杜塞尔多夫大学）
Algorithmic decision-making (ADM) increasingly shapes people's daily lives. Given that such autonomous systems can cause severe harm to individuals and social groups, fairness concerns have arisen. A human-centric approach demanded by scholars and policymakers requires taking people's fairness perceptions into account when designing and implementing ADM. We provide a comprehensive, systematic literature review synthesizing the existing empirical insights on perceptions of algorithmic fairness from 39 empirical studies spanning multiple domains and scientific disciplines. Through thorough codin…
Most proposed algorithmic fairness techniques require access to data on a "sensitive attribute" or "protected category" (such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality) in order to make performance comparisons and standardizations across groups, however this data is largely unavailable in practice, hindering the widespread adoption of algorithmic fairness. Through this paper, we consider calls to collect more data on demographics to enable algorithmic fairness and challenge the notion that discrimination can be overcome with smart enough technical methods and sufficient data alone. We show how …
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Univ. Lille（里尔大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Centrale Lille（里尔中央理工学院）
In recent years, machine learning (ML) algorithms have been deployed in safety-critical and high-stake decision-making, where the fairness of algorithms is of paramount importance. Fairness in ML centers on detecting bias towards certain demographic populations induced by an ML classifier and proposes algorithmic solutions to mitigate the bias with respect to different fairness definitions. To this end, several fairness verifiers have been proposed that compute the bias in the prediction of an ML classifier--essentially beyond a finite dataset--given the probability distribution of input featu…
Training datasets for machine learning often have some form of missingness. For example, to learn a model for deciding whom to give a loan, the available training data includes individuals who were given a loan in the past, but not those who were not. This missingness, if ignored, nullifies any fairness guarantee of the training procedure when the model is deployed. Using causal graphs, we characterize the missingness mechanisms in different real-world scenarios. We show conditions under which various distributions, used in popular fairness algorithms, can or can not be recovered from the trai…
New York University（纽约大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦图灵研究所）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
In this work, we argue for the importance of causal reasoning in creating fair algorithms for decision making. We give a review of existing approaches to fairness, describe work in causality necessary for the understanding of causal approaches, argue why causality is necessary for any approach that wishes to be fair, and give a detailed analysis of the many recent approaches to causality-based fairness.
The McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校麦库姆斯商学院）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
The extensive adoption of business analytics (BA) has brought financial gains and increased efficiencies. However, these advances have simultaneously drawn attention to rising legal and ethical challenges when BA inform decisions with fairness implications. As a response to these concerns, the emerging study of algorithmic fairness deals with algorithmic outputs that may result in disparate outcomes or other forms of injustices for subgroups of the population, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Fairness is relevant on the basis of legal compliance, social responsibility,…
Cohort Shapley value is a model-free method of variable importance grounded in game theory that does not use any unobserved and potentially impossible feature combinations. We use it to evaluate algorithmic fairness, using the well known COMPAS recidivism data as our example. This approach allows one to identify for each individual in a data set the extent to which they were adversely or beneficially affected by their value of a protected attribute such as their race. The method can do this even if race was not one of the original predictors and even if it does not have access to a proprietary…
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…
DeepMind；Centre for Artificial Intelligence, University College London（伦敦大学学院人工智能中心）
Advances in algorithmic fairness have largely omitted sexual orientation and gender identity. We explore queer concerns in privacy, censorship, language, online safety, health, and employment to study the positive and negative effects of artificial intelligence on queer communities. These issues underscore the need for new directions in fairness research that take into account a multiplicity of considerations, from privacy preservation, context sensitivity and process fairness, to an awareness of sociotechnical impact and the increasingly important role of inclusive and participatory research …
Equity of educational outcome and fairness of AI with respect to race have been topics of increasing importance in education. In this work, we address both with empirical evaluations of grade prediction in higher education, an important task to improve curriculum design, plan interventions for academic support, and offer course guidance to students. With fairness as the aim, we trial several strategies for both label and instance balancing to attempt to minimize differences in algorithm performance with respect to race. We find that an adversarial learning approach, combined with grade label b…
University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
Today, artificial intelligence systems driven by machine learning algorithms can be in a position to take important, and sometimes legally binding, decisions about our everyday lives. In many cases, however, these systems and their actions are neither regulated nor certified. To help counter the potential harm that such algorithms can cause we developed an open source toolbox that can analyse selected fairness, accountability and transparency aspects of the machine learning process: data (and their features), models and predictions, allowing to automatically and objectively report them to rele…
Disease identification is a core, routine activity in observational health research. Cohorts impact downstream analyses, such as how a condition is characterized, how patient risk is defined, and what treatments are studied. It is thus critical to ensure that selected cohorts are representative of all patients, independently of their demographics or social determinants of health. While there are multiple potential sources of bias when constructing phenotype definitions which may affect their fairness, it is not standard in the field of phenotyping to consider the impact of different definition…
Fairness is increasingly recognized as a critical component of machine learning systems. However, it is the underlying data on which these systems are trained that often reflect discrimination, suggesting a database repair problem. Existing treatments of fairness rely on statistical correlations that can be fooled by statistical anomalies, such as Simpson's paradox. Proposals for causality-based definitions of fairness can correctly model some of these situations, but they require specification of the underlying causal models. In this paper, we formalize the situation as a database repair prob…
Algorithmic fairness is a major concern in recent years as the influence of machine learning algorithms becomes more widespread. In this paper, we investigate the issue of algorithmic fairness from a network-centric perspective. Specifically, we introduce a novel yet intuitive function known as network-centric fairness perception and provide an axiomatic approach to analyze its properties. Using a peer-review network as case study, we also examine its utility in terms of assessing the perception of fairness in paper acceptance decisions. We show how the function can be extended to a group fair…
The Neutrality Fallacy: When Algorithmic Fairness Interventions are (Not) Positive Action
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Sciences Po Law School（巴黎政治学院法学院）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；IEA-Paris（巴黎经济合作协会）
Fairness is an increasingly important concern as machine learning models are used to support decision making in high-stakes applications such as mortgage lending, hiring, and prison sentencing. This paper introduces a new open source Python toolkit for algorithmic fairness, AI Fairness 360 (AIF360), released under an Apache v2.0 license {https://github.com/ibm/aif360). The main objectives of this toolkit are to help facilitate the transition of fairness research algorithms to use in an industrial setting and to provide a common framework for fairness researchers to share and evaluate algorithm…
Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Mississippi（密西西比大学）；National Institutes of Health（美国国立卫生研究院）
Fairness and Bias in Algorithmic Hiring: a Multidisciplinary Survey
Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy（安全与隐私研究所）；Radboud University（拉德博德大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Randstad（Randstad公司）；European University Viadrina（弗赖堡大学）
Most existing notions of algorithmic fairness are one-shot: they ensure some form of allocative equality at the time of decision making, but do not account for the adverse impact of the algorithmic decisions today on the long-term welfare and prosperity of certain segments of the population. We take a broader perspective on algorithmic fairness. We propose an effort-based measure of fairness and present a data-driven framework for characterizing the long-term impact of algorithmic policies on reshaping the underlying population. Motivated by the psychological literature on \emph{social learnin…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Auditing machine learning-based (ML) healthcare tools for bias is critical to preventing patient harm, especially in communities that disproportionately face health inequities. General frameworks are becoming increasingly available to measure ML fairness gaps between groups. However, ML for health (ML4H) auditing principles call for a contextual, patient-centered approach to model assessment. Therefore, ML auditing tools must be (1) better aligned with ML4H auditing principles and (2) able to illuminate and characterize communities vulnerable to the most harm. To address this gap, we propose s…
Federated learning (FL) has gain growing interests for its capability of learning from distributed data sources collectively without the need of accessing the raw data samples across different sources. So far FL research has mostly focused on improving the performance, how the algorithmic disparity will be impacted for the model learned from FL and the impact of algorithmic disparity on the utility inconsistency are largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose an FL framework to jointly consider performance consistency and algorithmic fairness across different local clients (data sources). We…
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy（普林斯顿信息技术政策中心）；Parity Technologies, Inc.（Parity科技公司）
Computer scientists are trained to create abstractions that simplify and generalize. However, a premature abstraction that omits crucial contextual details creates the risk of epistemic trespassing, by falsely asserting its relevance into other contexts. We study how the field of responsible AI has created an imperfect synecdoche by abstracting the four-fifths rule (a.k.a. the 4/5 rule or 80% rule), a single part of disparate impact discrimination law, into the disparate impact metric. This metric incorrectly introduces a new deontic nuance and new potentials for ethical harms that were absent…
Efforts to promote equitable public policy with algorithms appear to be fundamentally constrained by the "impossibility of fairness" (an incompatibility between mathematical definitions of fairness). This technical limitation raises a central question about algorithmic fairness: How can computer scientists and policymakers support equitable policy reforms with algorithms? In this article, I argue that promoting justice with algorithms requires reforming the methodology of algorithmic fairness. First, I diagnose the problems of the current methodology for algorithmic fairness, which I call "for…
Algorithmic fairness has been framed as a newly emerging technology that mitigates systemic discrimination in automated decision-making, providing opportunities to improve fairness in information systems (IS). However, based on a state-of-the-art literature review, we argue that fairness is an inherently social concept and that technologies for algorithmic fairness should therefore be approached through a sociotechnical lens. We advance the discourse on algorithmic fairness as a sociotechnical phenomenon. Our research objective is to embed AF in the sociotechnical view of IS. Specifically, we …
