arXivDaily arXiv每日学术速递 周一至周五更新
arXiv 2307.08232cs.LGcs.CYstat.ML
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从观测数据中学习反事实公平性

Learning for Counterfactual Fairness from Observational Data

University of Virginia(弗吉尼亚大学);Bytedance Research(字节跳动研究院)

Jing Ma, Ruocheng Guo, Aidong Zhang, Jundong Li

AI总结:

针对因果模型未知导致反事实公平预测困难的问题,本文提出 CLAIRE 框架,利用反事实数据增强与不变惩罚进行表示学习,在合成及真实数据上提升公平性与预测效果。

摘要:

公平感知机器学习已在在线广告、个性化推荐以及网络应用中的社交媒体分析等众多领域引起广泛关注。公平感知机器学习旨在消除学习模型对由种族、性别和年龄等受保护(敏感)属性所描述的特定子群体的偏见。在许多现有公平性概念中,反事实公平性是从因果视角定义的一种流行概念。它通过比较每个个体在原始世界中的预测,与在敏感属性值被修改的反事实世界中的预测,来衡量预测器的公平性。现有方法实现反事实公平性的一个前提条件是,需要人类事先掌握数据因果模型的知识。然而,在现实场景中,底层因果模型通常是未知的,获取此类人类知识可能非常困难。在这些场景下,直接信任来自可靠性未知的信息源甚至因果发现方法所获得的因果模型是有风险的,因为不正确的因果模型会进而给预测器带来偏见,并导致不公平的预测。在本工作中,我们通过提出一种新颖的框架 CLAIRE,解决在没有给定因果模型的情况下从观测数据进行反事实公平预测的问题。具体而言,在某些一般假设下,CLAIRE 借助基于反事实数据增强和不变惩罚的表示学习框架,有效缓解来自敏感属性的偏见。在合成数据集和真实世界数据集上进行的实验,验证了 CLAIRE 在反事实公平性和预测性能两方面的优越性。

英文摘要:

Fairness-aware machine learning has attracted a surge of attention in many domains, such as online advertising, personalized recommendation, and social media analysis in web applications. Fairness-aware machine learning aims to eliminate biases of learning models against certain subgroups described by certain protected (sensitive) attributes such as race, gender, and age. Among many existing fairness notions, counterfactual fairness is a popular notion defined from a causal perspective. It measures the fairness of a predictor by comparing the prediction of each individual in the original world and that in the counterfactual worlds in which the value of the sensitive attribute is modified. A prerequisite for existing methods to achieve counterfactual fairness is the prior human knowledge of the causal model for the data. However, in real-world scenarios, the underlying causal model is often unknown, and acquiring such human knowledge could be very difficult. In these scenarios, it is risky to directly trust the causal models obtained from information sources with unknown reliability and even causal discovery methods, as incorrect causal models can consequently bring biases to the predictor and lead to unfair predictions. In this work, we address the problem of counterfactually fair prediction from observational data without given causal models by proposing a novel framework CLAIRE. Specifically, under certain general assumptions, CLAIRE effectively mitigates the biases from the sensitive attribute with a representation learning framework based on counterfactual data augmentation and an invariant penalty. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superiority of CLAIRE in both counterfactual fairness and prediction performance.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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