arXiv:2411.08425cs.LGcs.CY2024-11被引 14

研究不同类别不平衡下公平性度量的表现,帮人选对评估工具

Properties of fairness measures in the context of varying class imbalance and protected group ratios

  • 分析六种主流公平性度量在类别和群体比例变化时的数学特性
  • 发现等机会、正向预测一致性比准确率平等更受类别不平衡影响
  • 为实际应用中选择合适公平性度量提供理论依据

社会日益依赖机器学习模型进行刑事司法、信用风险评估和招聘决策。为防止自动化系统对特定群体产生歧视,公平性度量已成为关键组件。然而,现有度量大多仅关注保护群体间的预测差异,未考虑目标变量的类别不平衡问题。当前研究多聚焦于实际应用中的影响,而非度量本身的独立于数据集的性质。本文系统分析了六种主流群组公平性度量的概率质量函数,研究其在类别不平衡比例变化下的行为。我们还量化了在不同不平衡比率下实现完美公平的概率变化。结果表明,等机会(Equal Opportunity)和正向预测一致性(Positive Predictive Parity)比准确率平等(Accuracy Equality)更敏感于类别不平衡。这些发现有助于研究人员和实践者根据具体任务选择最合适的公平性度量。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Society is increasingly relying on predictive models in fields like criminal justice, credit risk management, or hiring. To prevent such automated systems from discriminating against people belonging to certain groups, fairness measures have become a crucial component in socially relevant applications of machine learning. However, existing fairness measures have been designed to assess the bias between predictions for protected groups without considering the imbalance in the classes of the target variable. Current research on the potential effect of class imbalance on fairness focuses on practical applications rather than dataset-independent measure properties. In this paper, we study the general properties of fairness measures for changing class and protected group proportions. For this purpose, we analyze the probability mass functions of six of the most popular group fairness measures. We also measure how the probability of achieving perfect fairness changes for varying class imbalance ratios. Moreover, we relate the dataset-independent properties of fairness measures described in this paper to classifier fairness in real-life tasks. Our results show that measures such as Equal Opportunity and Positive Predictive Parity are more sensitive to changes in class imbalance than Accuracy Equality. These findings can help guide researchers and practitioners in choosing the most appropriate fairness measures for their classification problems.

公平性评估类别不平衡机器学习伦理

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