English

Fair Representations by Compression

Machine Learning 2021-06-01 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

Organizations that collect and sell data face increasing scrutiny for the discriminatory use of data. We propose a novel unsupervised approach to transform data into a compressed binary representation independent of sensitive attributes. We show that in an information bottleneck framework, a parsimonious representation should filter out information related to sensitive attributes if they are provided directly to the decoder. Empirical results show that the proposed method, \textbf{FBC}, achieves state-of-the-art accuracy-fairness trade-off. Explicit control of the entropy of the representation bit stream allows the user to move smoothly and simultaneously along both rate-distortion and rate-fairness curves. \end{abstract}

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.14044,
  title  = {Fair Representations by Compression},
  author = {Xavier Gitiaux and Huzefa Rangwala},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.14044},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:35:08.420Z