We introduce a new rule-based optimization method for classification with constraints. The proposed method leverages column generation for linear programming, and hence, is scalable to large datasets. The resulting pricing subproblem is shown to be NP-Hard. We recourse to a decision tree-based heuristic and solve a proxy pricing subproblem for acceleration. The method returns a set of rules along with their optimal weights indicating the importance of each rule for learning. We address interpretability and fairness by assigning cost coefficients to the rules and introducing additional constraints. In particular, we focus on local interpretability and generalize a separation criterion in fairness to multiple sensitive attributes and classes. We test the performance of the proposed methodology on a collection of datasets and present a case study to elaborate on its different aspects. The proposed rule-based learning method exhibits a good compromise between local interpretability and fairness on the one side, and accuracy on the other side.
Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo, USP（圣保罗大学理工学院，USP）
One often finds in the literature connections between measures of fairness and measures of feature importance employed to interpret trained classifiers. However, there seems to be no study that compares fairness measures and feature importance measures. In this paper we propose ways to evaluate and compare such measures. We focus in particular on SHAP, a game-theoretic measure of feature importance; we present results for a number of unfairness-prone datasets.
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 …
The recent release of large-scale healthcare datasets has greatly propelled the research of data-driven deep learning models for healthcare applications. However, due to the nature of such deep black-boxed models, concerns about interpretability, fairness, and biases in healthcare scenarios where human lives are at stake call for a careful and thorough examinations of both datasets and models. In this work, we focus on MIMIC-IV (Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care, version IV), the largest publicly available healthcare dataset, and conduct comprehensive analyses of dataset representati…
On the use of graph models to achieve individual and group fairness
Department of Statistics. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid（统计系. 皇家卡洛斯三世大学）；uc3m-Santander Big Data Institute. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid（uc3m-桑坦德大数据研究所. 皇家卡洛斯三世大学）
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；CognitiveScale
As artificial intelligence plays an increasingly important role in our society, there are ethical and moral obligations for both businesses and researchers to ensure that their machine learning models are designed, deployed, and maintained responsibly. These models need to be rigorously audited for fairness, robustness, transparency, and interpretability. A variety of methods have been developed that focus on these issues in isolation, however, managing these methods in conjunction with model development can be cumbersome and timeconsuming. In this paper, we introduce a unified and model-agnos…
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences（哈佛大学约翰·A·保尔森工程与应用科学学院）；Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study（拉德克利夫高等研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）
It is well understood that classification algorithms, for example, for deciding on loan applications, cannot be evaluated for fairness without taking context into account. We examine what can be learned from a fairness oracle equipped with an underlying understanding of ``true'' fairness. The oracle takes as input a (context, classifier) pair satisfying an arbitrary fairness definition, and accepts or rejects the pair according to whether the classifier satisfies the underlying fairness truth. Our principal conceptual result is an extraction procedure that learns the underlying truth; moreover…
Context: Machine learning software can generate models that inappropriately discriminate against specific protected social groups (e.g., groups based on gender, ethnicity, etc). Motivated by those results, software engineering researchers have proposed many methods for mitigating those discriminatory effects. While those methods are effective in mitigating bias, few of them can provide explanations on what is the root cause of bias. Objective: We aim at better detection and mitigation of algorithmic discrimination in machine learning software problems. Method: Here we propose xFAIR, a model-ba…
Comprehensive and Reliable Feature Attribution for Diverse Modalities and Models via Frequency-Domain Insights
School of Computational Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算科学学院）；Brain Research Center, Wuhan University（武汉大学脑科学研究中心）；College of Information Science and Technology (School of Cyber Science and Technology), Shihezi University（石河子大学信息科学学院（网络安全科学与技术学院））；Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Key Laboratory of Computing Intelligence and Network Information Security Open Fund（新疆生产建设兵团计算智能与网络信息安全重点实验室开放基金）
The objective of this article is to introduce a fairness interpretability framework for measuring and explaining the bias in classification and regression models at the level of a distribution. In our work, we measure the model bias across sub-population distributions in the model output using the Wasserstein metric. To properly quantify the contributions of predictors, we take into account the favorability of both the model and predictors with respect to the non-protected class. The quantification is accomplished by the use of transport theory, which gives rise to the decomposition of the mod…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Explaining deep learning models is of vital importance for understanding artificial intelligence systems, improving safety, and evaluating fairness. To better understand and control the CNN model, many methods for transparency-interpretability have been proposed. However, most of these works are less intuitive for human understanding and have insufficient human control over the CNN model. We propose a novel method, Transparent and Controllable Network Learning (TCNL), to overcome such challenges. Towards the goal of improving transparency-interpretability, in TCNL, we define some concepts for …
SoK: Taming the Triangle -- On the Interplays between Fairness, Interpretability and Privacy in Machine Learning
LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, CNRS（LAAS-CNRS，图卢兹大学，法国国家科学研究中心）；École de Technologie Supérieure（高等工程技术学院）；Université du Québec à Montréal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）
Towards Cohesion-Fairness Harmony: Contrastive Regularization in Individual Fair Graph Clustering
L3S Research Centre, Leibniz University Hannover（莱布尼茨汉诺威大学L3S研究中心）；University of Kurdistan（库尔德斯坦大学）；RI CODE, University of the Bundeswehr Munich（慕尼黑联邦国防军大学RI CODE）
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries such as healthcare and criminal justice. However, the fairness issues in these models have long been criticized, and the use of big data and machine learning algorithms in the construction of scoring systems heightens this concern. In this paper, we propose a general framework to create fairness-aware, data-driven scoring systems. First, we develop a social welfa…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of Chicago Booth School of Business（芝加哥大学布斯商学院）
Algorithms are increasingly used to aid, or in some cases supplant, human decision-making, particularly for decisions that hinge on predictions. As a result, two additional features in addition to prediction quality have generated interest: (i) to facilitate human interaction and understanding with these algorithms, we desire prediction functions that are in some fashion simple or interpretable; and (ii) because they influence consequential decisions, we also want them to produce equitable allocations. We develop a formal model to explore the relationship between the demands of simplicity and …
Interpretable and Fair Generalized Additive Neural Networks via Multi-objective Learning
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University（北京师范大学-香港浸会大学联合国际学院）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Texas A&M University（德州农工大学）
Recent studies on Learning to Optimize (L2O) suggest a promising path to automating and accelerating the optimization procedure for complicated tasks. Existing L2O models parameterize optimization rules by neural networks, and learn those numerical rules via meta-training. However, they face two common pitfalls: (1) scalability: the numerical rules represented by neural networks create extra memory overhead for applying L2O models, and limit their applicability to optimizing larger tasks; (2) interpretability: it is unclear what an L2O model has learned in its black-box optimization rule, nor …
Balancing Performance and Fairness in Explainable AI for Anomaly Detection in Distributed Power Plants Monitoring
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)（非洲数学科学研究所）；Rhodes University（罗德斯大学）；National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS)（国家理论与计算科学研究所）；Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑路易斯·马克西米利安大学）；University of Ferrara（费拉拉大学）
Fair representation learning provides an effective way of enforcing fairness constraints without compromising utility for downstream users. A desirable family of such fairness constraints, each requiring similar treatment for similar individuals, is known as individual fairness. In this work, we introduce the first method that enables data consumers to obtain certificates of individual fairness for existing and new data points. The key idea is to map similar individuals to close latent representations and leverage this latent proximity to certify individual fairness. That is, our method enable…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
We propose a distributionally robust classification model with a fairness constraint that encourages the classifier to be fair in view of the equality of opportunity criterion. We use a type-$\infty$ Wasserstein ambiguity set centered at the empirical distribution to model distributional uncertainty and derive a conservative reformulation for the worst-case equal opportunity unfairness measure. We establish that the model is equivalent to a mixed binary optimization problem, which can be solved by standard off-the-shelf solvers. To improve scalability, we further propose a convex, hinge-loss-b…
The interpretability of machine learning models has been an essential area of research for the safe deployment of machine learning systems. One particular approach is to attribute model decisions to high-level concepts that humans can understand. However, such concept-based explainability for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has been studied mostly on image domain. In this paper, we extend TCAV, the concept attribution approach, to tabular learning, by providing an idea on how to define concepts over tabular data. On a synthetic dataset with ground-truth concept explanations and a real-world datase…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
The prototypical NLP experiment trains a standard architecture on labeled English data and optimizes for accuracy, without accounting for other dimensions such as fairness, interpretability, or computational efficiency. We show through a manual classification of recent NLP research papers that this is indeed the case and refer to it as the square one experimental setup. We observe that NLP research often goes beyond the square one setup, e.g, focusing not only on accuracy, but also on fairness or interpretability, but typically only along a single dimension. Most work targeting multilinguality…
Fair clustering is the process of grouping similar entities together, while satisfying a mathematically well-defined fairness metric as a constraint. Due to the practical challenges in precise model specification, the prescribed fairness constraints are often incomplete and act as proxies to the intended fairness requirement, leading to biased outcomes when the system is deployed. We examine how to identify the intended fairness constraint for a problem based on limited demonstrations from an expert. Each demonstration is a clustering over a subset of the data. We present an algorithm to ident…
Artificial neural nets can represent and classify many types of data but are often tailored to particular applications -- e.g., for "fair" or "hierarchical" classification. Once an architecture has been selected, it is often difficult for humans to adjust models for a new task; for example, a hierarchical classifier cannot be easily transformed into a fair classifier that shields a protected field. Our contribution in this work is a new neural network architecture, the concept subspace network (CSN), which generalizes existing specialized classifiers to produce a unified model capable of learn…
Federal Institute of São Paulo (IFSP)（圣保罗联邦学院（IFSP））；University of São Paulo (USP)（圣保罗大学（USP））；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）
Over the past decades, classification models have proven to be essential machine learning tools given their potential and applicability in various domains. In these years, the north of the majority of the researchers had been to improve quantitative metrics, notwithstanding the lack of information about models' decisions such metrics convey. This paradigm has recently shifted, and strategies beyond tables and numbers to assist in interpreting models' decisions are increasing in importance. Part of this trend, visualization techniques have been extensively used to support classification models'…
Feedzai（Feedzai公司）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；UC Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
Tabular data is prevalent in many high-stakes domains, such as financial services or public policy. Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) are popular in these settings due to their scalability, performance, and low training cost. While fairness in these domains is a foremost concern, existing in-processing Fair ML methods are either incompatible with GBDT, or incur in significant performance losses while taking considerably longer to train. We present FairGBM, a dual ascent learning framework for training GBDT under fairness constraints, with little to no impact on predictive performance when…
Legislation and public sentiment throughout the world have promoted fairness metrics, explainability, and interpretability as prescriptions for the responsible development of ethical artificial intelligence systems. Despite the importance of these three pillars in the foundation of the field, they can be challenging to operationalize and attempts to solve the problems in production environments often feel Sisyphean. This difficulty stems from a number of factors: fairness metrics are computationally difficult to incorporate into training and rarely alleviate all of the harms perpetrated by the…
With the rise of AI, algorithms have become better at learning underlying patterns from the training data including ingrained social biases based on gender, race, etc. Deployment of such algorithms to domains such as hiring, healthcare, law enforcement, etc. has raised serious concerns about fairness, accountability, trust and interpretability in machine learning algorithms. To alleviate this problem, we propose D-BIAS, a visual interactive tool that embodies human-in-the-loop AI approach for auditing and mitigating social biases from tabular datasets. It uses a graphical causal model to repre…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Rule-based models, e.g., decision trees, are widely used in scenarios demanding high model interpretability for their transparent inner structures and good model expressivity. However, rule-based models are hard to optimize, especially on large data sets, due to their discrete parameters and structures. Ensemble methods and fuzzy/soft rules are commonly used to improve performance, but they sacrifice the model interpretability. To obtain both good scalability and interpretability, we propose a new classifier, named Rule-based Representation Learner (RRL), that automatically learns interpretabl…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Microsoft（微软）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）
Classification, a heavily-studied data-driven machine learning task, drives an increasing number of prediction systems involving critical human decisions such as loan approval and criminal risk assessment. However, classifiers often demonstrate discriminatory behavior, especially when presented with biased data. Consequently, fairness in classification has emerged as a high-priority research area. Data management research is showing an increasing presence and interest in topics related to data and algorithmic fairness, including the topic of fair classification. The interdisciplinary efforts i…
Machine learning has become omnipresent with applications in various safety-critical domains such as medical, law, and transportation. In these domains, high-stake decisions provided by machine learning necessitate researchers to design interpretable models, where the prediction is understandable to a human. In interpretable machine learning, rule-based classifiers are particularly effective in representing the decision boundary through a set of rules comprising input features. The interpretability of rule-based classifiers is in general related to the size of the rules, where smaller rules ar…
