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1. Differential Fairness

   Foulds, James R.; Islam, Rashidul; Keya, Kamrun Naher; Pan, Shimei (December 2019, NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Machine Learning with Guarantees)

   We propose differential fairness, a multi-attribute definition of fairness in machine learning which is informed by the framework of intersectionality, a critical lens arising from the humanities literature, leveraging connections between differential privacy and legal notions of fairness. We show that our criterion behaves sensibly for any subset of the set of protected attributes, and we prove economic, privacy, and generalization guarantees. We provide a learning algorithm which respects our differential fairness criterion. Experiments on the COMPAS criminal recidivism dataset and census data demonstrate the utility of our methods. 

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2. Differential Privacy and Fairness in Decisions and Learning Tasks: A Survey

   https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/766  

   Fioretto, Ferdinando; Tran, Cuong; Van Hentenryck, Pascal; Zhu, Keyu (January 2022, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI))

   This paper surveys recent work in the intersection of differential privacy (DP) and fairness. It reviews the conditions under which privacy and fairness may have aligned or contrasting goals, analyzes how and why DP may exacerbate bias and unfairness in decision problems and learning tasks, and describes available mitigation measures for the fairness issues arising in DP systems. The survey provides a unified understanding of the main challenges and potential risks arising when deploying privacy-preserving machine-learning or decisions-making tasks under a fairness lens. 

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3. Differential Fairness: An Intersectional Framework for Fair AI

   https://doi.org/10.3390/e25040660  

   Islam, Rashidul; Keya, Kamrun Naher; Pan, Shimei; Sarwate, Anand D.; Foulds, James R. (April 2023, Entropy)

   We propose definitions of fairness in machine learning and artificial intelligence systems that are informed by the framework of intersectionality, a critical lens from the legal, social science, and humanities literature which analyzes how interlocking systems of power and oppression affect individuals along overlapping dimensions including gender, race, sexual orientation, class, and disability. We show that our criteria behave sensibly for any subset of the set of protected attributes, and we prove economic, privacy, and generalization guarantees. Our theoretical results show that our criteria meaningfully operationalize AI fairness in terms of real-world harms, making the measurements interpretable in a manner analogous to differential privacy. We provide a simple learning algorithm using deterministic gradient methods, which respects our intersectional fairness criteria. The measurement of fairness becomes statistically challenging in the minibatch setting due to data sparsity, which increases rapidly in the number of protected attributes and in the values per protected attribute. To address this, we further develop a practical learning algorithm using stochastic gradient methods which incorporates stochastic estimation of the intersectional fairness criteria on minibatches to scale up to big data. Case studies on census data, the COMPAS criminal recidivism dataset, the HHP hospitalization data, and a loan application dataset from HMDA demonstrate the utility of our methods. 

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4. Learning to Design Fair and Private Voting Rules

   https://doi.org/10.1613/jair.1.13734  

   Mohsin, Farhad; Liu, Ao; Chen, Pin-Yu; Rossi, Francesca; Xia, Lirong (September 2022, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research)

   Voting is used widely to identify a collective decision for a group of agents, based on their preferences. In this paper, we focus on evaluating and designing voting rules that support both the privacy of the voting agents and a notion of fairness over such agents. To do this, we introduce a novel notion of group fairness and adopt the existing notion of local differential privacy. We then evaluate the level of group fairness in several existing voting rules, as well as the trade-offs between fairness and privacy, showing that it is not possible to always obtain maximal economic efficiency with high fairness or high privacy levels. Then, we present both a machine learning and a constrained optimization approach to design new voting rules that are fair while maintaining a high level of economic efficiency. Finally, we empirically examine the effect of adding noise to create local differentially private voting rules and discuss the three-way trade-off between economic efficiency, fairness, and privacy.This paper appears in the special track on AI & Society. 

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5. Constrained-Based Differential Privacy

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2021.2  

   Fioretto, Ferdinando (January 2021, International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2021))

   Data sets and statistics about groups of individuals are increasingly collected and released, feeding many optimization and learning algorithms. In many cases, the released data contain sensitive information whose privacy is strictly regulated. For example, in the U.S., the census data is regulated under Title 13, which requires that no individual be identified from any data released by the Census Bureau. In Europe, data release is regulated according to the General Data Protection Regulation, which addresses the control and transfer of personal data. Differential privacy has emerged as the de-facto standard to protect data privacy. In a nutshell, differentially private algorithms protect an individual’s data by injecting random noise into the output of a computation that involves such data. While this process ensures privacy, it also impacts the quality of data analysis, and, when private data sets are used as inputs to complex machine learning or optimization tasks, they may produce results that are fundamentally different from those obtained on the original data and even rise unintended bias and fairness concerns. In this talk, I will first focus on the challenge of releasing privacy-preserving data sets for complex data analysis tasks. I will introduce the notion of Constrained-based Differential Privacy (C-DP), which allows casting the data release problem to an optimization problem whose goal is to preserve the salient features of the original data. I will review several applications of C-DP in the context of very large hierarchical census data, data streams, energy systems, and in the design of federated data-sharing protocols. Next, I will discuss how errors induced by differential privacy algorithms may propagate within a decision problem causing biases and fairness issues. This is particularly important as privacy-preserving data is often used for critical decision processes, including the allocation of funds and benefits to states and jurisdictions, which ideally should be fair and unbiased. Finally, I will conclude with a roadmap to future work and some open questions. 

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