English

Faking Fairness via Stealthily Biased Sampling

Machine Learning 2019-12-02 v2 Cryptography and Security Machine Learning

Abstract

Auditing fairness of decision-makers is now in high demand. To respond to this social demand, several fairness auditing tools have been developed. The focus of this study is to raise an awareness of the risk of malicious decision-makers who fake fairness by abusing the auditing tools and thereby deceiving the social communities. The question is whether such a fraud of the decision-maker is detectable so that the society can avoid the risk of fake fairness. In this study, we answer this question negatively. We specifically put our focus on a situation where the decision-maker publishes a benchmark dataset as the evidence of his/her fairness and attempts to deceive a person who uses an auditing tool that computes a fairness metric. To assess the (un)detectability of the fraud, we explicitly construct an algorithm, the stealthily biased sampling, that can deliberately construct an evil benchmark dataset via subsampling. We show that the fraud made by the stealthily based sampling is indeed difficult to detect both theoretically and empirically.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.08291,
  title  = {Faking Fairness via Stealthily Biased Sampling},
  author = {Kazuto Fukuchi and Satoshi Hara and Takanori Maehara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.08291},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted at the Special Track on AI for Social Impact (AISI) at AAAI2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:20:47.235Z