Related papers: Consider the Alternatives: Navigating Fairness-Acc…
While the accuracy-fairness trade-off has been frequently observed in the literature of fair machine learning, rigorous theoretical analyses have been scarce. To demystify this long-standing challenge, this work seeks to develop a…
In the application of machine learning to real-life decision-making systems, e.g., credit scoring and criminal justice, the prediction outcomes might discriminate against people with sensitive attributes, leading to unfairness. The commonly…
A trade-off between accuracy and fairness is almost taken as a given in the existing literature on fairness in machine learning. Yet, it is not preordained that accuracy should decrease with increased fairness. Novel to this work, we…
When it is ethical and legal to use a sensitive attribute (such as gender or race) in machine learning systems, the question remains how to do so. We show that the naive application of machine learning algorithms using sensitive features…
With the growing adoption of machine learning (ML) systems in areas like law enforcement, criminal justice, finance, hiring, and admissions, it is increasingly critical to guarantee the fairness of decisions assisted by ML. In this paper,…
Improving the fairness of machine learning models is a nuanced task that requires decision makers to reason about multiple, conflicting criteria. The majority of fair machine learning methods transform the error-fairness trade-off into a…
Among the various aspects of algorithmic fairness studied in recent years, the tension between satisfying both \textit{sufficiency} and \textit{separation} -- e.g. the ratios of positive or negative predictive values, and false positive or…
The fairness of machine learning-based decisions has become an increasingly important focus in the design of supervised machine learning methods. Most fairness approaches optimize a specified trade-off between performance measure(s) (e.g.,…
Real-world applications of machine learning tools in high-stakes domains are often regulated to be fair, in the sense that the predicted target should satisfy some quantitative notion of parity with respect to a protected attribute.…
Consider the problem of finding the best matching in a weighted graph where we only have access to predictions of the actual stochastic weights, based on an underlying context. If the predictor is the Bayes optimal one, then computing the…
Fairness in machine learning has received considerable attention. However, most studies on fair learning focus on either supervised learning or unsupervised learning. Very few consider semi-supervised settings. Yet, in reality, most machine…
Algorithmic fairness has emerged as an important consideration when using machine learning to make high-stakes societal decisions. Yet, improved fairness often comes at the expense of model accuracy. While aspects of the fairness-accuracy…
Optimizing NLP models for fairness poses many challenges. Lack of differentiable fairness measures prevents gradient-based loss training or requires surrogate losses that diverge from the true metric of interest. In addition, competing…
We revisit the foundations of fairness and its interplay with utility and efficiency in settings where the training data contain richer labels, such as individual types, rankings, or risk estimates, rather than just binary outcomes. In this…
We study the problem of learning classifiers with a fairness constraint, with three main contributions towards the goal of quantifying the problem's inherent tradeoffs. First, we relate two existing fairness measures to cost-sensitive…
As multi-task models gain popularity in a wider range of machine learning applications, it is becoming increasingly important for practitioners to understand the fairness implications associated with those models. Most existing fairness…
Across machine learning (ML) sub-disciplines, researchers make explicit mathematical assumptions in order to facilitate proof-writing. We note that, specifically in the area of fairness-accuracy trade-off optimization scholarship, similar…
We study fairness-accuracy tradeoffs when a single predictive model must serve multiple demographic groups. A useful tool for understanding this tradeoff is the fairness-accuracy (FA) Pareto frontier, which characterizes the set of models…
The goal of fairness in classification is to learn a classifier that does not discriminate against groups of individuals based on sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. One approach to designing fair algorithms is to use relaxations…
Our study revisits the problem of accuracy-fairness tradeoff in binary classification. We argue that comparison of non-discriminatory classifiers needs to account for different rates of positive predictions, otherwise conclusions about…