English

A Novel Regularization Approach to Fair ML

Machine Learning 2022-08-16 v1

Abstract

A number of methods have been introduced for the fair ML issue, most of them complex and many of them very specific to the underlying ML moethodology. Here we introduce a new approach that is simple, easily explained, and potentially applicable to a number of standard ML algorithms. Explicitly Deweighted Features (EDF) reduces the impact of each feature among the proxies of sensitive variables, allowing a different amount of deweighting applied to each such feature. The user specifies the deweighting hyperparameters, to achieve a given point in the Utility/Fairness tradeoff spectrum. We also introduce a new, simple criterion for evaluating the degree of protection afforded by any fair ML method.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.06557,
  title  = {A Novel Regularization Approach to Fair ML},
  author = {Norman Matloff and Wenxi Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.06557},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:40:50.226Z