English

A Note on the Significance Adjustment for FA*IR with Two Protected Groups

Information Retrieval 2020-12-24 v1

Abstract

In this report we provide an improvement of the significance adjustment from the FA*IR algorithm of Zehlike et al., which did not work for very short rankings in combination with a low minimum proportion pp for the protected group. We show how the minimum number of protected candidates per ranking position can be calculated exactly and provide a mapping from the continuous space of significance levels (α\alpha) to a discrete space of tables, which allows us to find αc\alpha_c using a binary search heuristic.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.12795,
  title  = {A Note on the Significance Adjustment for FA*IR with Two Protected Groups},
  author = {Meike Zehlike and Tom Sühr and Carlos Castillo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.12795},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:18:31.435Z