Modeling Epistemological Principles for Bias Mitigation in AI Systems: An Illustration in Hiring Decisions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used extensively in automatic decision making in a broad variety of scenarios, ranging from credit ratings for loans to recommendations of movies. Traditional design guidelines for AI models focus essentially on accuracy maximization, but recent work has shown that economically irrational and socially unacceptable scenarios of discrimination and unfairness are likely to arise unless these issues are explicitly addressed. This undesirable behavior has several possible sources, such as biased datasets used for training that may not be detected in black-box models. After pointing out connections between such bias of AI and the problem of induction, we focus on Popper's contributions after Hume's, which offer a logical theory of preferences. An AI model can be preferred over others on purely rational grounds after one or more attempts at refutation based on accuracy and fairness. Inspired by such epistemological principles, this paper proposes a structured approach to mitigate discrimination and unfairness caused by bias in AI systems. In the proposed computational framework, models are selected and enhanced after attempts at refutation. To illustrate our discussion, we focus on hiring decision scenarios where an AI system filters in which job applicants should go to the interview phase

Economic determinants of citizens’ support for the European Union

We investigate the determinants of public support for EU membership using a panel of fifteen countries over the 1974 - 2008 period. The results indicate that increases in inflation and unemployment rate generate a decrease in support for EU membership, while growth of GDP growth increases support. There is evidence of erosion in citizens’ support as time in the Union accumulates and when the country is under the excessive deficit procedure. Splitting the sample into different periods reveals that real economic variables were more influential in shaping citizens’ support for the EU than nominal variables during the first years of the Community, but inflation became the most relevant variable after implementation of the Treaty of the European Union.European integration, public support, economic performance, panel-data