English

Penalizing Unfairness in Binary Classification

Machine Learning 2018-03-09 v3 Machine Learning

Abstract

We present a new approach for mitigating unfairness in learned classifiers. In particular, we focus on binary classification tasks over individuals from two populations, where, as our criterion for fairness, we wish to achieve similar false positive rates in both populations, and similar false negative rates in both populations. As a proof of concept, we implement our approach and empirically evaluate its ability to achieve both fairness and accuracy, using datasets from the fields of criminal risk assessment, credit, lending, and college admissions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.00044,
  title  = {Penalizing Unfairness in Binary Classification},
  author = {Yahav Bechavod and Katrina Ligett},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.00044},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:34:55.616Z