Welfare measures overall utility across a population, whereas malfare measures overall disutility, and the social planner’s problem can be cast either as maximizing the former or minimizing the latter. We show novel bounds on the expectations and tail probabilities of estimators of welfare, malfare, and regret of per-group (dis)utility values, where estimates are made from a finite sample drawn from each group. In particular, we consider estimating these quantities for individual functions (e.g., allocations or classifiers) with standard probabilistic bounds, and optimizing and bounding generalization error over hypothesis classes (i.e., we quantify overfitting) using Rademacher averages. We then study algorithmic fairness through the lens of sample complexity, finding that because marginalized or minority groups are often understudied, and fewer data are therefore available, the social planner is more likely to overfit to these groups, thus even models that seem fair in training can be systematically biased against such groups. We argue that this effect can be mitigated by ensuring sufficient sample sizes for each group, and our sample complexity analysis characterizes these sample sizes. Motivated by these conclusions, we present progressive sampling algorithms to efficiently optimize various fairness objectives.
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DENOUNCER: detection of unfairness in classifiers
The use of automated data-driven tools for decision-making has gained popularity in recent years. At the same time, the reported cases of algorithmic bias and discrimination increase as well, which in turn lead to an extensive study of algorithmic fairness. Numerous notions of fairness have been proposed, designed to capture different scenarios. These measures typically refer to a "protected group" in the data, defined using values of some sensitive attributes. Confirming whether a fairness definition holds for a given group is a simple task, but detecting groups that are treated unfairly by the algorithm may be computationally prohibitive as the number of possible groups is combinatorial. We present a method for detecting such groups efficiently for various fairness definitions. Our solution is implemented in a system called DENOUNCER, an interactive system that allows users to explore different fairness measures of a (trained) classifier for a given test data. We propose to demonstrate the usefulness of DENOUNCER using real-life data and illustrate the effectiveness of our method.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10353854
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 2150-8097
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2719 to 2722
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.14778/3476311.3476328
