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1. On testing for discrimination using causal models

   H. Chocker and J. Y. Halpern (February 2022, Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Consider a bank that uses an AI system to decide which loan applications to approve. We want to ensure that the system is fair, that is, it does not discriminate against applicants based on a predefined list of sensitive attributes, such as gender and ethnicity. We expect there to be a regulator whose job it is to certify the bank's system as fair or unfair. We consider issues that the regulator will have to confront when making such a decision, including the precise definition of fairness, dealing with proxy variables, and dealing with what we call allowed variables, that is, variables such as salary on which the decision is allowed to depend, despite being correlated with sensitive variables. We show (among other things) that the problem of deciding fairness as we have defined it is co-NP-complete, but then argue that, despite that, in practice the problem should be manageable. 

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2. Models and mechanisms for spatial data fairness

   https://doi.org/10.14778/3565816.3565820  

   Shaham, Sina; Ghinita, Gabriel; Shahabi, Cyrus (October 2022, Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment)

   Fairness in data-driven decision-making studies scenarios where individuals from certain population segments may be unfairly treated when being considered for loan or job applications, access to public resources, or other types of services. In location-based applications, decisions are based on individual whereabouts, which often correlate with sensitive attributes such as race, income, and education. While fairness has received significant attention recently, e.g., in machine learning, there is little focus on achieving fairness when dealing with location data. Due to their characteristics and specific type of processing algorithms, location data pose important fairness challenges. We introduce the concept of spatial data fairness to address the specific challenges of location data and spatial queries. We devise a novel building block to achieve fairness in the form of fair polynomials. Next, we propose two mechanisms based on fair polynomials that achieve individual spatial fairness, corresponding to two common location-based decision-making types: distance-based and zone-based. Extensive experimental results on real data show that the proposed mechanisms achieve spatial fairness without sacrificing utility. 

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3. InfoFair: Information-Theoretic Intersectional Fairness

   https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData55660.2022.10020588  

   Kang, Jian; Xie, Tiankai; Wu, Xintao; Maciejewski, Ross; Tong, Hanghang (December 2022, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data))

   Algorithmic fairness is becoming increasingly important in data mining and machine learning. Among others, a foundational notation is group fairness. The vast majority of the existing works on group fairness, with a few exceptions, primarily focus on debiasing with respect to a single sensitive attribute, despite the fact that the co-existence of multiple sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, marital status, etc.) in the real-world is commonplace. As such, methods that can ensure a fair learning outcome with respect to all sensitive attributes of concern simultaneously need to be developed. In this paper, we study the problem of information-theoretic intersectional fairness (InfoFair), where statistical parity, a representative group fairness measure, is guaranteed among demographic groups formed by multiple sensitive attributes of interest. We formulate it as a mutual information minimization problem and propose a generic end-to-end algorithmic framework to solve it. The key idea is to leverage a variational representation of mutual information, which considers the variational distribution between learning outcomes and sensitive attributes, as well as the density ratio between the variational and the original distributions. Our proposed framework is generalizable to many different settings, including other statistical notions of fairness, and could handle any type of learning task equipped with a gradientbased optimizer. Empirical evaluations in the fair classification task on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively debias the classification results with minimal impact to the classification accuracy. 

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4. Hidden or Inferred - Fair Learning-To-Rank With Unknown Demographics

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aies.v7i1.31705  

   Olulana, Oluseun; Cachel, Kathleen; Murai, Fabricio; Rundensteiner, Elke (October 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society)

   As learning-to-rank models are increasingly deployed for decision-making in areas with profound life implications, the FairML community has been developing fair learning-to-rank (LTR) models. These models rely on the availability of sensitive demographic features such as race or sex. However, in practice, regulatory obstacles and privacy concerns protect this data from collection and use. As a result, practitioners may either need to promote fairness despite the absence of these features or turn to demographic inference tools to attempt to infer them. Given that these tools are fallible, this paper aims to further understand how errors in demographic inference impact the fairness performance of popular fair LTR strategies. In which cases would it be better to keep such demographic attributes hidden from models versus infer them? We examine a spectrum of fair LTR strategies ranging from fair LTR with and without demographic features hidden versus inferred to fairness-unaware LTR followed by fair re-ranking. We conduct a controlled empirical investigation modeling different levels of inference errors by systematically perturbing the inferred sensitive attribute. We also perform three case studies with real-world datasets and popular open-source inference methods. Our findings reveal that as inference noise grows, LTR-based methods that incorporate fairness considerations into the learning process may increase bias. In contrast, fair re-ranking strategies are more robust to inference errors. All source code, data, and experimental artifacts of our experimental study are available here: https://github.com/sewen007/hoiltr.git 

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5. Individual Fairness with Group Constraints in Graph Neural Networks

   Wang, Zichong; Ulloa, David; Yu, Tongjia; Rangaswami, Raju; Yap, Roland; Zhang, Wenbin (October 2024, Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2023)

   Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains. Despite the successes of GNN deployment, their utilization often reflects societal biases, which critically hinder their adoption in high-stake decision-making scenarios such as online clinical diagnosis, financial crediting, etc. Numerous efforts have been made to develop fair GNNs but they typically concentrate on either individual or group fairness, overlooking the intricate interplay between the two, resulting in the enhancement of one, usually at the cost of the other. In addition, existing individual fairness approaches using a ranking perspective fail to identify discrimination in the ranking. This paper introduces two innovative notions dealing with individual graph fairness and group-aware individual graph fairness, aiming to more accurately measure individual and group biases. Our Group Equality Individual Fairness (GEIF) framework is designed to achieve individual fairness while equalizing the level of individual fairness among subgroups. Preliminary experiments on several real-world graph datasets demonstrate that GEIF outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in terms of individual fairness, group fairness, and utility performance. 

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