Retiring Adult: New Datasets for Fair Machine Learning

C. Haas Simon Caton

4 Oktober 2020

When Machine Learning technologies are used in contexts that affect citizens, companies as well as researchers need to be confident that there will not be any unexpected social implications, such as bias towards gender, ethnicity, and/or people with disabilities. There is significant literature on approaches to mitigate bias and promote fairness, yet the area is complex and hard to penetrate for newcomers to the domain. This article seeks to provide an overview of the different schools of thought and approaches that aim to increase the fairness of Machine Learning. It organizes approaches into the widely accepted framework of pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing methods, subcategorizing into a further 11 method areas. Although much of the literature emphasizes binary classification, a discussion of fairness in regression, recommender systems, and unsupervised learning is also provided along with a selection of currently available open source libraries. The article concludes by summarizing open challenges articulated as five dilemmas for fairness research.

E. Shmueli Dana Pessach

3 Februari 2022

An increasing number of decisions regarding the daily lives of human beings are being controlled by artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) algorithms in spheres ranging from healthcare, transportation, and education to college admissions, recruitment, provision of loans, and many more realms. Since they now touch on many aspects of our lives, it is crucial to develop ML algorithms that are not only accurate but also objective and fair. Recent studies have shown that algorithmic decision making may be inherently prone to unfairness, even when there is no intention for it. This article presents an overview of the main concepts of identifying, measuring, and improving algorithmic fairness when using ML algorithms, focusing primarily on classification tasks. The article begins by discussing the causes of algorithmic bias and unfairness and the common definitions and measures for fairness. Fairness-enhancing mechanisms are then reviewed and divided into pre-process, in-process, and post-process mechanisms. A comprehensive comparison of the mechanisms is then conducted, toward a better understanding of which mechanisms should be used in different scenarios. The article ends by reviewing several emerging research sub-fields of algorithmic fairness, beyond classification.

Giovanna Guerrini B. Catania Chiara Accinelli

9 Juni 2022

The data science era is characterized by data-driven automated decision systems  (ADS) enabling, through data analytics and machine learning, automated decisions in many contexts, deeply impacting our lives. As such, their downsides and potential risks are becoming more and more evident: technical solutions, alone, are not sufficient and an interdisciplinary approach is needed. Consequently, ADS should evolve into  data-informed ADS , which take  humans in the loop  in all the data processing steps. Data-informed ADS should deal with data responsibly , guaranteeing nondiscrimination  with respect to protected groups of individuals. Nondiscrimination can be characterized in terms of different types of properties, like fairness and diversity. While fairness, i.e., absence of bias against minorities, has been widely investigated in machine learning, only more recently this issue has been tackled by considering all the steps of data processing pipelines at the basis of ADS, from data acquisition to analysis. Additionally, fairness is just one point of view of nondiscrimination to be considered for guaranteeing equity: other issues, like diversity, are raising interest from the scientific community due to their relevance in society. This paper aims at critically surveying how nondiscrimination has been investigated in the context of complex data science pipelines at the basis of data-informed ADS, by focusing on the specific data processing tasks for which nondiscrimination solutions have been proposed.

Jiongli Zhu Babak Salimi Sainyam Galhotra + 1 lainnya

21 Desember 2022

This paper proposes a novel framework for certifying the fairness of predictive models trained on biased data. It draws from query answering for incomplete and inconsistent databases to formulate the problem of consistent range approximation (CRA) of fairness queries for a predictive model on a target population. The framework employs background knowledge of the data collection process and biased data, working with or without limited statistics about the target population, to compute a range of answers for fairness queries. Using CRA, the framework builds predictive models that are certifiably fair on the target population, regardless of the availability of external data during training. The framework's efficacy is demonstrated through evaluations on real data, showing substantial improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Zhenpeng Chen M. Harman J Zhang + 2 lainnya

15 Juli 2022

This article provides a comprehensive survey of bias mitigation methods for achieving fairness in Machine Learning (ML) models. We collect a total of 341 publications concerning bias mitigation for ML classifiers. These methods can be distinguished based on their intervention procedure (i.e., pre-processing, in-processing, post-processing) and the technique they apply. We investigate how existing bias mitigation methods are evaluated in the literature. In particular, we consider datasets, metrics, and benchmarking. Based on the gathered insights (e.g., What is the most popular fairness metric? How many datasets are used for evaluating bias mitigation methods?), we hope to support practitioners in making informed choices when developing and evaluating new bias mitigation methods.