As machine learning is increasingly used to make real-world decisions, recent
research efforts aim to define and ensure fairness in algorithmic decision
making. Existing methods often assume a fixed set of observable features to
define individuals, but lack a discussion of certain features not being
observed at test time. In this paper, we study fairness of naive Bayes
classifiers, which allow partial observations. In particular, we introduce the
notion of a discrimination pattern, which refers to an individual receiving
different classifications depending on whether some sensitive attributes were
observed. Then a model is considered fair if it has no such pattern. We propose
an algorithm to discover and mine for discrimination patterns in a naive Bayes
classifier, and show how to learn maximum likelihood parameters subject to
these fairness constraints. Our approach iteratively discovers and eliminates
discrimination patterns until a fair model is learned. An empirical evaluation
on three real-world datasets demonstrates that we can remove exponentially many
discrimination patterns by only adding a small fraction of them as constraints