研究机器学习房价预测中的种族偏见,发现模型存在系统性不公平。
Machine Learning Fairness in House Price Prediction: A Case Study of America's Expanding Metropolises
- 结合建筑与社区属性构建房价预测模型
- 发现模型对少数族裔存在不同程度的预测偏差
- 提出内处理偏见缓解方法更有效,适合政策制定者参考
住房作为基本需求,对健康、教育和生活质量具有重要影响,其市场状况是促进社会公平的关键。尽管已有大量研究致力于构建高精度的机器学习(ML)房价预测模型,但对这些模型在种族与民族属性上是否存在偏见仍缺乏深入理解,这直接影响到模型的负责任使用。本文基于结构特征与邻里层面数据构建多种ML模型,并从不同特权群体定义出发,全面评估模型公平性。结果表明,现有模型在预测中对受保护属性(如种族与族裔)存在不同程度的偏差。进一步测试了多种偏见缓解策略,实验显示不同方法在各类模型上的效果各异,总体而言,内处理(in-processing)方法比预处理(pre-processing)更具有效性。代码已公开于 https://github.com/wahab1412/housing_fairness。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As a basic human need, housing plays a key role in enhancing health, well-being, and educational outcome in society, and the housing market is a major factor for promoting quality of life and ensuring social equity. To improve the housing conditions, there has been extensive research on building Machine Learning (ML)-driven house price prediction solutions to accurately forecast the future conditions, and help inform actions and policies in the field. In spite of their success in developing high-accuracy models, there is a gap in our understanding of the extent to which various ML-driven house price prediction approaches show ethnic and/or racial bias, which in turn is essential for the responsible use of ML, and ensuring that the ML-driven solutions do not exacerbate inequity. To fill this gap, this paper develops several ML models from a combination of structural and neighborhood-level attributes, and conducts comprehensive assessments on the fairness of ML models under various definitions of privileged groups. As a result, it finds that the ML-driven house price prediction models show various levels of bias towards protected attributes (i.e., race and ethnicity in this study). Then, it investigates the performance of different bias mitigation solutions, and the experimental results show their various levels of effectiveness on different ML-driven methods. However, in general, the in-processing bias mitigation approach tends to be more effective than the pre-processing one in this problem domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/wahab1412/housing_fairness.
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