Year: 2018
Type: preprint
Abstract: Fairness-aware classification is receiving increasing attention in the machine learning fields. Recently research proposes to formulate the fairness-aware classification as constrained optimization problems. However, several limitations exist in previous works due to the lack of a theoretical framework for guiding the formulation. In this paper, we propose a general framework for learning fair classifiers which addresses previous limitations. The framework formulates various commonly-used fairness metrics as convex constraints that can be directly incorporated into classic classification models. Within the framework, we propose a constraint-free criterion on the training data which ensures that any classifier learned from the data is fair. We also derive the constraints which ensure that the real fairness metric is satisfied when surrogate functions are used to achieve convexity. Our framework can be used to for formulating fairness-aware classification with fairness guarantee and computational efficiency. The experiments using real-world datasets demonstrate our theoretical results and show the effectiveness of proposed framework and methods.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Wu, Yongkai, Zhang, Lu, Wu, Xintao
Institution: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W2890611915