15,287 research outputs found
Fairness Behind a Veil of Ignorance: A Welfare Analysis for Automated Decision Making
We draw attention to an important, yet largely overlooked aspect of
evaluating fairness for automated decision making systems---namely risk and
welfare considerations. Our proposed family of measures corresponds to the
long-established formulations of cardinal social welfare in economics, and is
justified by the Rawlsian conception of fairness behind a veil of ignorance.
The convex formulation of our welfare-based measures of fairness allows us to
integrate them as a constraint into any convex loss minimization pipeline. Our
empirical analysis reveals interesting trade-offs between our proposal and (a)
prediction accuracy, (b) group discrimination, and (c) Dwork et al.'s notion of
individual fairness. Furthermore and perhaps most importantly, our work
provides both heuristic justification and empirical evidence suggesting that a
lower-bound on our measures often leads to bounded inequality in algorithmic
outcomes; hence presenting the first computationally feasible mechanism for
bounding individual-level inequality.Comment: Conference: Thirty-second Conference on Neural Information Processing
Systems (NIPS 2018
Matching Code and Law: Achieving Algorithmic Fairness with Optimal Transport
Increasingly, discrimination by algorithms is perceived as a societal and
legal problem. As a response, a number of criteria for implementing algorithmic
fairness in machine learning have been developed in the literature. This paper
proposes the Continuous Fairness Algorithm (CFA) which enables a
continuous interpolation between different fairness definitions. More
specifically, we make three main contributions to the existing literature.
First, our approach allows the decision maker to continuously vary between
specific concepts of individual and group fairness. As a consequence, the
algorithm enables the decision maker to adopt intermediate ``worldviews'' on
the degree of discrimination encoded in algorithmic processes, adding nuance to
the extreme cases of ``we're all equal'' (WAE) and ``what you see is what you
get'' (WYSIWYG) proposed so far in the literature. Second, we use optimal
transport theory, and specifically the concept of the barycenter, to maximize
decision maker utility under the chosen fairness constraints. Third, the
algorithm is able to handle cases of intersectionality, i.e., of
multi-dimensional discrimination of certain groups on grounds of several
criteria. We discuss three main examples (credit applications; college
admissions; insurance contracts) and map out the legal and policy implications
of our approach. The explicit formalization of the trade-off between individual
and group fairness allows this post-processing approach to be tailored to
different situational contexts in which one or the other fairness criterion may
take precedence. Finally, we evaluate our model experimentally.Comment: Vastly extended new version, now including computational experiment
Fairness in Credit Scoring: Assessment, Implementation and Profit Implications
The rise of algorithmic decision-making has spawned much research on fair
machine learning (ML). Financial institutions use ML for building risk
scorecards that support a range of credit-related decisions. Yet, the
literature on fair ML in credit scoring is scarce. The paper makes two
contributions. First, we provide a systematic overview of algorithmic options
for incorporating fairness goals in the ML model development pipeline. In this
scope, we also consolidate the space of statistical fairness criteria and
examine their adequacy for credit scoring. Second, we perform an empirical
study of different fairness processors in a profit-oriented credit scoring
setup using seven real-world data sets. The empirical results substantiate the
evaluation of fairness measures, identify more and less suitable options to
implement fair credit scoring, and clarify the profit-fairness trade-off in
lending decisions. Specifically, we find that multiple fairness criteria can be
approximately satisfied at once and identify separation as a proper criterion
for measuring the fairness of a scorecard. We also find fair in-processors to
deliver a good balance between profit and fairness. More generally, we show
that algorithmic discrimination can be reduced to a reasonable level at a
relatively low cost.Comment: Preprint submitted to European Journal of Operational Researc
On Measuring Bias in Online Information
Bias in online information has recently become a pressing issue, with search
engines, social networks and recommendation services being accused of
exhibiting some form of bias. In this vision paper, we make the case for a
systematic approach towards measuring bias. To this end, we discuss formal
measures for quantifying the various types of bias, we outline the system
components necessary for realizing them, and we highlight the related research
challenges and open problems.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur
Fair Inputs and Fair Outputs: The Incompatibility of Fairness in Privacy and Accuracy
Fairness concerns about algorithmic decision-making systems have been mainly
focused on the outputs (e.g., the accuracy of a classifier across individuals
or groups). However, one may additionally be concerned with fairness in the
inputs. In this paper, we propose and formulate two properties regarding the
inputs of (features used by) a classifier. In particular, we claim that fair
privacy (whether individuals are all asked to reveal the same information) and
need-to-know (whether users are only asked for the minimal information required
for the task at hand) are desirable properties of a decision system. We explore
the interaction between these properties and fairness in the outputs (fair
prediction accuracy). We show that for an optimal classifier these three
properties are in general incompatible, and we explain what common properties
of data make them incompatible. Finally we provide an algorithm to verify if
the trade-off between the three properties exists in a given dataset, and use
the algorithm to show that this trade-off is common in real data
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