聚焦决策区间的公平性,提升资源分配的公正性与模型效果。
Decision-centric fairness: Evaluation and optimization for resource allocation problems
- 仅在决策阈值区间内优化公平性,避免全局约束导致性能下降。
- 实验表明,在多个数据集上决策中心公平性显著提升资源分配公正性。
- 适合关注实际决策公平性的信贷、营销等场景应用。
数据驱动的决策支持工具在多个领域中日益关键。本文研究用于预测正向结果得分并决定资源分配的二分类模型,如贷款审批信用分或客户流失倾向分。此类模型可能通过预测得分对特定群体表现出歧视行为,导致不公平的资源分配。本文以群体间均等性(demographic parity)为公平性度量,比较不同群体基于正向结果得分被选中的比例。提出一种决策中心公平性方法,仅在决策区域(即可能用于资源分配的评分阈值范围)内实现公平性,而非在整个评分分布上强制均衡。该方法避免对模型施加过度限制,防止预测质量不必要的下降。在多个(半合成)数据集上对比决策中心与全局公平性方法,验证了聚焦于真正重要的决策环节可带来显著优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Data-driven decision support tools play an increasingly central role in decision-making across various domains. In this work, we focus on binary classification models for predicting positive-outcome scores and deciding on resource allocation, e.g., credit scores for granting loans or churn propensity scores for targeting customers with a retention campaign. Such models may exhibit discriminatory behavior toward specific demographic groups through their predicted scores, potentially leading to unfair resource allocation. We focus on demographic parity as a fairness metric to compare the proportions of instances that are selected based on their positive outcome scores across groups. In this work, we propose a decision-centric fairness methodology that induces fairness only within the decision-making region -- the range of relevant decision thresholds on the score that may be used to decide on resource allocation -- as an alternative to a global fairness approach that seeks to enforce parity across the entire score distribution. By restricting the induction of fairness to the decision-making region, the proposed decision-centric approach avoids imposing overly restrictive constraints on the model, which may unnecessarily degrade the quality of the predicted scores. We empirically compare our approach to a global fairness approach on multiple (semi-synthetic) datasets to identify scenarios in which focusing on fairness where it truly matters, i.e., decision-centric fairness, proves beneficial.
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