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Poster
From Parity to Preference-based Notions of Fairness in Classification
Muhammad Bilal Zafar · Isabel Valera · Manuel Rodriguez · Krishna Gummadi · Adrian Weller

Wed Dec 06 06:30 PM -- 10:30 PM (PST) @ Pacific Ballroom #78
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The adoption of automated, data-driven decision making in an ever expanding range of applications has raised concerns about its potential unfairness towards certain social groups. In this context, a number of recent studies have focused on defining, detecting, and removing unfairness from data-driven decision systems. However, the existing notions of fairness, based on parity (equality) in treatment or outcomes for different social groups, tend to be quite stringent, limiting the overall decision making accuracy. In this paper, we draw inspiration from the fair-division and envy-freeness literature in economics and game theory and propose preference-based notions of fairness -- given the choice between various sets of decision treatments or outcomes, any group of users would collectively prefer its treatment or outcomes, regardless of the (dis)parity as compared to the other groups. Then, we introduce tractable proxies to design margin-based classifiers that satisfy these preference-based notions of fairness. Finally, we experiment with a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets and show that preference-based fairness allows for greater decision accuracy than parity-based fairness.

Keywords: Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

Author Information

Muhammad Bilal Zafar (Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence)
Isabel Valera (MPI for Intelligent Systems)
Manuel Rodriguez (MPI SWS)
Krishna Gummadi (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems)
Adrian Weller (University of Cambridge)

Adrian Weller is Programme Director for AI at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK national institute for data science and AI, where he is also a Turing Fellow leading work on safe and ethical AI. He is a Principal Research Fellow in Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, and at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence where he is Programme Director for Trust and Society. His interests span AI, its commercial applications and helping to ensure beneficial outcomes for society. He serves on several boards including the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. Previously, Adrian held senior roles in finance.

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