arXiv:2411.09847cs.LGstat.ML2024-11被引 3

改进非负矩阵分解的公平性,通过最小最大目标函数提升群体间公平性。

Towards a Fairer Non-negative Matrix Factorization

  • 采用最小最大目标函数重构NMF优化问题,平衡群体间差异。
  • 实验显示该方法可提升群体公平性,但可能增加部分个体误差。
  • 适合关注模型公平性的实际应用者,如推荐系统或社会数据分析。

近年来机器学习中的公平性与偏见问题受到广泛关注。由于不存在通用的公平性解决方案,机器学习方法应与实用且易操作的偏见缓解策略一同发展。受近期关于“公平”主成分分析工作的启发,本文聚焦更具挑战性的非负矩阵分解(NMF),其在主题建模和特征提取中具有重要应用价值。我们证明,通过引入最小最大形式的目标函数修改,可在某些情况下改善群体间的公平性。为此,我们推导出两种优化方法:乘法更新规则与交替最小化方案,并讨论实现细节。通过一系列合成与真实数据实验,验证了该方法在提升公平性方面的有效性,同时指出该方法有时会增加部分个体的误差。这强调了公平性并非刚性定义,方法选择需紧密结合具体应用场景。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

There has been a recent critical need to study fairness and bias in machine learning (ML) algorithms. Since there is clearly no one-size-fits-all solution to fairness, ML methods should be developed alongside bias mitigation strategies that are practical and approachable to the practitioner. Motivated by recent work on ``fair" PCA, here we consider the more challenging method of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as both a showcasing example and a method that is important in its own right for both topic modeling tasks and feature extraction for other ML tasks. We demonstrate that a modification of the objective function, by using a min-max formulation, may \textit{sometimes} be able to offer an improvement in fairness for groups in the population. We derive two methods for the objective minimization, a multiplicative update rule as well as an alternating minimization scheme, and discuss implementation practicalities. We include a suite of synthetic and real experiments that show how the method may improve fairness while also highlighting the important fact that this may sometime increase error for some individuals and fairness is not a rigid definition and method choice should strongly depend on the application at hand.

非负矩阵分解公平性偏见缓解

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