English

Multicalibrated Regression for Downstream Fairness

Machine Learning 2022-09-16 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

We show how to take a regression function f^\hat{f} that is appropriately ``multicalibrated'' and efficiently post-process it into an approximately error minimizing classifier satisfying a large variety of fairness constraints. The post-processing requires no labeled data, and only a modest amount of unlabeled data and computation. The computational and sample complexity requirements of computing f^\hat f are comparable to the requirements for solving a single fair learning task optimally, but it can in fact be used to solve many different downstream fairness-constrained learning problems efficiently. Our post-processing method easily handles intersecting groups, generalizing prior work on post-processing regression functions to satisfy fairness constraints that only applied to disjoint groups. Our work extends recent work showing that multicalibrated regression functions are ``omnipredictors'' (i.e. can be post-processed to optimally solve unconstrained ERM problems) to constrained optimization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.07312,
  title  = {Multicalibrated Regression for Downstream Fairness},
  author = {Ira Globus-Harris and Varun Gupta and Christopher Jung and Michael Kearns and Jamie Morgenstern and Aaron Roth},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.07312},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T01:21:59.815Z