论文标题
走向阈值不变的公平分类
Towards Threshold Invariant Fair Classification
论文作者
论文摘要
有效的机器学习模型可以自动从大量数据中学习有用的信息,并以高精度提供决策。但是,这些模型可能会在感兴趣的人群中从某些意义上产生不公平的预测,在这些人群中,分组基于种族和性别等敏感属性。在先前的艺术中提出了各种公平定义,例如人口平等和均衡的赔率,以确保以机器学习模型为指导的决策是公平的。不幸的是,经过这些公平定义训练的“公平”模型对阈值敏感,即,在调整决策阈值时,公平状况可能不再成立。本文介绍了阈值不变公平的概念,该概念在不同的群体上实施了与决策阈值无关的公平性能。为了实现这一目标,本文提议通过两种近似方法在组之间均衡风险分布。实验结果表明,所提出的方法可有效缓解旨在实现公平性的机器学习模型中的阈值灵敏度。
Effective machine learning models can automatically learn useful information from a large quantity of data and provide decisions in a high accuracy. These models may, however, lead to unfair predictions in certain sense among the population groups of interest, where the grouping is based on such sensitive attributes as race and gender. Various fairness definitions, such as demographic parity and equalized odds, were proposed in prior art to ensure that decisions guided by the machine learning models are equitable. Unfortunately, the "fair" model trained with these fairness definitions is threshold sensitive, i.e., the condition of fairness may no longer hold true when tuning the decision threshold. This paper introduces the notion of threshold invariant fairness, which enforces equitable performances across different groups independent of the decision threshold. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes to equalize the risk distributions among the groups via two approximation methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methodology is effective to alleviate the threshold sensitivity in machine learning models designed to achieve fairness.