不依赖用户身份信息也能实现公平预测,且不影响模型准确率。
Demographic-Agnostic Fairness without Harm
- 用群体分类器自动分组,再为每组定制独立分类器。
- 在真实和合成数据上,公平性优于传统方法且准确率不降。
- 适合医疗等高风险场景,无需知晓用户性别、年龄等隐私信息。
随着机器学习在社会领域广泛应用,算法对特定群体的偏见引发关注。现有公平性方法多基于均等化原则,但常牺牲模型准确率,不适用于医疗等高风险领域。已有研究采用偏好公平性,让各群体更倾向于自身获得的预测结果,但依赖训练时已知的个体身份信息。本文提出一种无需身份信息的「无害去身份公平性」(DAFH)算法,联合学习群体划分分类器与多个解耦分类器。理论分析显示,在有身份信息时,本方法性能优于基线。实验在合成与真实数据集上验证了其有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly used in social domains to make predictions about humans, there is a growing concern that these algorithms may exhibit biases against certain social groups. Numerous notions of fairness have been proposed in the literature to measure the unfairness of ML. Among them, one class that receives the most attention is \textit{parity-based}, i.e., achieving fairness by equalizing treatment or outcomes for different social groups. However, achieving parity-based fairness often comes at the cost of lowering model accuracy and is undesirable for many high-stakes domains like healthcare. To avoid inferior accuracy, a line of research focuses on \textit{preference-based} fairness, under which any group of individuals would experience the highest accuracy and collectively prefer the ML outcomes assigned to them if they were given the choice between various sets of outcomes. However, these works assume individual demographic information is known and fully accessible during training. In this paper, we relax this requirement and propose a novel \textit{demographic-agnostic fairness without harm (DAFH)} optimization algorithm, which jointly learns a group classifier that partitions the population into multiple groups and a set of decoupled classifiers associated with these groups. Theoretically, we conduct sample complexity analysis and show that our method can outperform the baselines when demographic information is known and used to train decoupled classifiers. Experiments on both synthetic and real data validate the proposed method.
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