807 research outputs found
Certifying and removing disparate impact
What does it mean for an algorithm to be biased? In U.S. law, unintentional
bias is encoded via disparate impact, which occurs when a selection process has
widely different outcomes for different groups, even as it appears to be
neutral. This legal determination hinges on a definition of a protected class
(ethnicity, gender, religious practice) and an explicit description of the
process.
When the process is implemented using computers, determining disparate impact
(and hence bias) is harder. It might not be possible to disclose the process.
In addition, even if the process is open, it might be hard to elucidate in a
legal setting how the algorithm makes its decisions. Instead of requiring
access to the algorithm, we propose making inferences based on the data the
algorithm uses.
We make four contributions to this problem. First, we link the legal notion
of disparate impact to a measure of classification accuracy that while known,
has received relatively little attention. Second, we propose a test for
disparate impact based on analyzing the information leakage of the protected
class from the other data attributes. Third, we describe methods by which data
might be made unbiased. Finally, we present empirical evidence supporting the
effectiveness of our test for disparate impact and our approach for both
masking bias and preserving relevant information in the data. Interestingly,
our approach resembles some actual selection practices that have recently
received legal scrutiny.Comment: Extended version of paper accepted at 2015 ACM SIGKDD Conference on
Knowledge Discovery and Data Minin
Fairness-Aware Ranking in Search & Recommendation Systems with Application to LinkedIn Talent Search
We present a framework for quantifying and mitigating algorithmic bias in
mechanisms designed for ranking individuals, typically used as part of
web-scale search and recommendation systems. We first propose complementary
measures to quantify bias with respect to protected attributes such as gender
and age. We then present algorithms for computing fairness-aware re-ranking of
results. For a given search or recommendation task, our algorithms seek to
achieve a desired distribution of top ranked results with respect to one or
more protected attributes. We show that such a framework can be tailored to
achieve fairness criteria such as equality of opportunity and demographic
parity depending on the choice of the desired distribution. We evaluate the
proposed algorithms via extensive simulations over different parameter choices,
and study the effect of fairness-aware ranking on both bias and utility
measures. We finally present the online A/B testing results from applying our
framework towards representative ranking in LinkedIn Talent Search, and discuss
the lessons learned in practice. Our approach resulted in tremendous
improvement in the fairness metrics (nearly three fold increase in the number
of search queries with representative results) without affecting the business
metrics, which paved the way for deployment to 100% of LinkedIn Recruiter users
worldwide. Ours is the first large-scale deployed framework for ensuring
fairness in the hiring domain, with the potential positive impact for more than
630M LinkedIn members.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication at ACM KDD 201
Postprandial Energy Metabolism in the Regulation of Body Weight: Is there a Mechanistic Role for Dietary Calcium?
There has been much interest in the mechanisms by which calcium may attenuate weight gain or accelerate body fat loss. This review focuses on postprandial energy metabolism and indicates that dietary calcium increases whole body fat oxidation after single and multiple meals. There is, as yet, no conclusive evidence for a greater diet induced thermogenesis, an increased lipolysis or suppression of key lipogenic enzyme systems. There is however convincing evidence that higher calcium intakes promote a modest energy loss through increased fecal fat excretion. Overall, there is a role for dietary calcium in human energy metabolism. Future studies need to define threshold intakes for metabolic and gastrointestinal outcomes
Bone Health in a Nonjaundiced Population of Children with Biliary Atresia
Objectives. To assess bone health in a cohort of nonjaundiced children with biliary atresia (BA) and the effect of growth and development on bone outcomes.
Methods. Children ages one to eighteen years receiving care from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia were recruited. Each child was seen once and assessed for growth, pubertal development, concurrent medications, bilirubin, ALT, albumin, vitamin D status, bone mineral density (BMD), and bone mineral content (BMC) of the lumbar spine and whole body. Results. BMD declined significantly with age, and upon further analysis with a well-phenotyped control cohort, it was found that BMC was significantly decreased for both lumbar spine and whole body, even after adjustment for confounding variables. An age interaction was identified, with older subjects having a significantly greater impairment in BMC. Conclusions. These preliminary results demonstrate that children with BA, including those without jaundice, are likely to have compromised bone health even when accounting for height and puberty, which are common confounding factors in chronic disease. Further investigation is needed to identify the determinants of poor bone mineral status and to develop strategies to prevent osteoporosis later in life
Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making: An Excursion Through the Lens of Causality
As virtually all aspects of our lives are increasingly impacted by
algorithmic decision making systems, it is incumbent upon us as a society to
ensure such systems do not become instruments of unfair discrimination on the
basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. We consider the problem of
determining whether the decisions made by such systems are discriminatory,
through the lens of causal models. We introduce two definitions of group
fairness grounded in causality: fair on average causal effect (FACE), and fair
on average causal effect on the treated (FACT). We use the Rubin-Neyman
potential outcomes framework for the analysis of cause-effect relationships to
robustly estimate FACE and FACT. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our
proposed approach on synthetic data. Our analyses of two real-world data sets,
the Adult income data set from the UCI repository (with gender as the protected
attribute), and the NYC Stop and Frisk data set (with race as the protected
attribute), show that the evidence of discrimination obtained by FACE and FACT,
or lack thereof, is often in agreement with the findings from other studies. We
further show that FACT, being somewhat more nuanced compared to FACE, can yield
findings of discrimination that differ from those obtained using FACE.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables.To appear in Proceedings of the
International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 201
Calcium-fortified beverage supplementation on body composition in postmenopausal women
BACKGROUND: We investigated the effects of a calcium-fortified beverage supplemented over 12 months on body composition in postmenopausal women (n = 37, age = 48–75 y). METHODS: Body composition (total-body percent fat, %Fat(TB); abdominal percent fat, %Fat(AB)) was measured with dual energy x-ray absorptiometry. After baseline assessments, subjects were randomly assigned to a free-living control group (CTL) or the supplement group (1,125 mg Ca(++)/d, CAL). Dietary intake was assessed with 3-day diet records taken at baseline and 12 months (POST). Physical activity was measured using the Yale Physical Activity Survey. RESULTS: At 12 months, the dietary calcium to protein ratio in the CAL group (32.3 ± 15.6 mg/g) was greater than the CTL group (15.2 ± 7.5 mg/g). There were no differences from baseline to POST between groups for changes in body weight (CAL = 0.1 ± 3.0 kg; CTL = 0.0 ± 2.9 kg), %Fat(TB )(CAL = 0.0 ± 2.4%; CTL = 0.5 ± 5.4%), %Fat(AB )(CAL = -0.4 ± 8.7%; CTL = 0.6 ± 8.7%), or fat mass (CAL = 1.3 ± 2.6 kg; CTL = 1.3 ± 2.7 kg). CONCLUSION: These results indicate that increasing the calcium to protein ratio over two-fold by consuming a calcium-fortified beverage for 12 months did not decrease body weight, body fat, or abdominal fat composition in postmenopausal women
Leukocytes Breach Endothelial Barriers by Insertion of Nuclear Lobes and Disassembly of Endothelial Actin Filaments
Israel Science Foundation (grant 87/12)
Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute Foundation (FAMRI) (grant FAMRI032001_CoE), USA
Minerva Foundation, Germany
Wellcome Trust (grant 098291/Z/12/Z to S.N.
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