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1. Individually Fair Learning with One Sided Feedback

   Bechavod, Yahav ; Roth, Aaroh ( January 2023 , International Conference on Machine Learning)

   We consider an online learning problem with one-sided feedback, in which the learner is able to observe the true label only for positively predicted instances. On each round, k instances arrive and receive classification outcomes according to a randomized policy deployed by the learner, whose goal is to maximize accuracy while deploying individually fair policies. We first extend the framework of Bechavod et al. (2020), which relies on the existence of a human fairness auditor for detecting fairness violations, to instead incorporate feedback from dynamically-selected panels of multiple, possibly inconsistent, auditors. We then construct an efficient reduction from our problem of online learning with one-sided feedback and a panel reporting fairness violations to the contextual combinatorial semi-bandit problem (Cesa-Bianchi & Lugosi, 2009, György et al., 2007). Finally, we show how to leverage the guarantees of two algorithms in the contextual combinatorial semi-bandit setting: Exp2 (Bubeck et al., 2012) and the oracle-efficient Context-Semi-Bandit-FTPL (Syrgkanis et al., 2016), to provide multi-criteria no regret guarantees simultaneously for accuracy and fairness. Our results eliminate two potential sources of bias from prior work: the "hidden outcomes" that are not available to an algorithm operating in the full information setting, and human biases that might be present in any single human auditor, but can be mitigated by selecting a well chosen panel. 

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2. GRASP: a goodness-of-fit test for classification learning

   https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssb/qkad106  

   Javanmard, Adel ; Mehrabi, Mohammad ( September 2023 , Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology)

   Performance of classifiers is often measured in terms of average accuracy on test data. Despite being a standard measure, average accuracy fails in characterising the fit of the model to the underlying conditional law of labels given the features vector (Y∣X), e.g. due to model misspecification, over fitting, and high-dimensionality. In this paper, we consider the fundamental problem of assessing the goodness-of-fit for a general binary classifier. Our framework does not make any parametric assumption on the conditional law Y∣X and treats that as a black-box oracle model which can be accessed only through queries. We formulate the goodness-of-fit assessment problem as a tolerance hypothesis testing of the form H0:E[Df(Bern(η(X))‖Bern(η^(X)))]≤τ where Df represents an f-divergence function, and η(x), η^(x), respectively, denote the true and an estimate likelihood for a feature vector x admitting a positive label. We propose a novel test, called Goodness-of-fit with Randomisation and Scoring Procedure (GRASP) for testing H0, which works in finite sample settings, no matter the features (distribution-free). We also propose model-X GRASP designed for model-X settings where the joint distribution of the features vector is known. Model-X GRASP uses this distributional information to achieve better power. We evaluate the performance of our tests through extensive numerical experiments.

    

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3. Optimized Score Transformation for Fair Classification

   Wei, D. ; Ramamurthy, K.N. ; Calmon, F.P. ( August 2020 , Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper considers fair probabilistic classification where the outputs of primary interest are predicted probabilities, commonly referred to as scores. We formulate the problem of transforming scores to satisfy fairness constraints while minimizing the loss in utility. The formulation can be applied either to post-process classifier outputs or to pre-process training data, thus allowing maximum freedom in selecting a classification algorithm. We derive a closed-form expression for the optimal transformed scores and a convex optimization problem for the transformation parameters. In the population limit, the transformed score function is the fairness-constrained minimizer of cross-entropy with respect to the optimal unconstrained scores. In the finite sample setting, we propose to approach this solution using a combination of standard probabilistic classifiers and ADMM. Comprehensive experiments comparing to 10 existing methods show that the proposed FairScoreTransformer has advantages for score-based metrics such as Brier score and AUC while remaining competitive for binary label-based metrics such as accuracy. 

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4. Metric-Fair Classifier Derandomization

   Wu, Jimmy ; Chen, Yatong ; Liu, Yang ( January 2022 , International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML))

   We study the problem of classifier derandomization in machine learning: given a stochastic binary classifier f:X→[0,1], sample a deterministic classifier f̂ :X→{0,1} that approximates the output of f in aggregate over any data distribution. Recent work revealed how to efficiently derandomize a stochastic classifier with strong output approximation guarantees, but at the cost of individual fairness -- that is, if f treated similar inputs similarly, f̂ did not. In this paper, we initiate a systematic study of classifier derandomization with metric fairness guarantees. We show that the prior derandomization approach is almost maximally metric-unfair, and that a simple ``random threshold'' derandomization achieves optimal fairness preservation but with weaker output approximation. We then devise a derandomization procedure that provides an appealing tradeoff between these two: if f is α-metric fair according to a metric d with a locality-sensitive hash (LSH) family, then our derandomized f̂ is, with high probability, O(α)-metric fair and a close approximation of f. We also prove generic results applicable to all (fair and unfair) classifier derandomization procedures, including a bias-variance decomposition and reductions between various notions of metric fairness. 

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5. Achieving Fair Treatment in Algorithmic Classification

   Andrew, Morgan ( January 2018 , Theory of Cryptography Conference)

   Fairness in classification has become an increasingly relevant and controversial issue as com- puters replace humans in many of today’s classification tasks. In particular, a subject of much recent debate is that of finding, and subsequently achieving, suitable definitions of fairness in an algorithmic context. In this work, following the work of Hardt et al. (NIPS’16), we consider and formalize the task of sanitizing an unfair classifier C into a classifier C′ satisfying an approximate notion of “equalized odds” or fair treatment. Our main result shows how to take any (possibly unfair) classifier C over a finite outcome space, and transform it—by just perturbing the out- put of C—according to some distribution learned by just having black-box access to samples of labeled, and previously classified, data, to produce a classifier C′ that satisfies fair treatment; we additionally show that our derived classifier is near-optimal in terms of accuracy. We also experimentally evaluate the performance of our method. 

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