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Poster

A Local Method for Satisfying Interventional Fairness with Partially Known Causal Graphs

Haoxuan Li · Yue Liu · Zhi Geng · Kun Zhang

East Exhibit Hall A-C #4707
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Wed 11 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Developing fair automated machine learning algorithms is critical in making safe and trustworthy decisions. Many causality-based fairness notions have been proposed to address the above issues by quantifying the causal connections between sensitive attributes and decisions, and when the true causal graph is fully known, certain algorithms that achieve interventional fairness have been proposed. However, when the true causal graph is unknown, it is still challenging to effectively and well exploit partially directed acyclic graphs (PDAGs) to achieve interventional fairness. To exploit the PDAGs for achieving interventional fairness, previous methods have been built on variable selection or causal effect identification, but limited to reduced prediction accuracy or strong assumption for identification. In this paper, we propose a general min-max optimization framework that can effectively achieve interventional fairness with promising prediction accuracy and can be extended to maximally oriented PDAGs (MPDAGs) with added background knowledge. Specifically, we first estimate all possible treatment effects of sensitive attributes on a given prediction model from all possible adjustment sets of sensitive attributes. Next, we propose to alternatively update the prediction model and the possible estimated causal effects, where the prediction model is trained via a min-max loss to control the worst-case fairness violations. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our methods.

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