Fairness-aware machine learning has attracted a surge of attention in many domains, such as online advertising, personalized recommendation, and social media analysis in web applications. Fairness-aware machine learning aims to eliminate biases of learning models against certain subgroups described by certain protected (sensitive) attributes such as race, gender, and age. Among many existing fairness notions, counterfactual fairness is a popular notion defined from a causal perspective. It measures the fairness of a predictor by comparing the prediction of each individual in the original world and that in the counterfactual worlds in which the value of the sensitive attribute is modified. A prerequisite for existing methods to achieve counterfactual fairness is the prior human knowledge of the causal model for the data. However, in real-world scenarios, the underlying causal model is often unknown, and acquiring such human knowledge could be very difficult. In these scenarios, it is risky to directly trust the causal models obtained from information sources with unknown reliability and even causal discovery methods, as incorrect causal models can consequently bring biases to the predictor and lead to unfair predictions. In this work, we address the problem of counterfactually fair prediction from observational data without given causal models by proposing a novel framework CLAIRE. Specifically, under certain general assumptions, CLAIRE effectively mitigates the biases from the sensitive attribute with a representation learning framework based on counterfactual data augmentation and an invariant penalty. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superiority of CLAIRE in both counterfactual fairness and prediction performance.
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Learning Fair Node Representations with Graph Counterfactual Fairness
Fair machine learning aims to mitigate the biases of model predictions against certain subpopulations regarding sensitive attributes such as race and gender. Among the many existing fairness notions, counterfactual fairness measures the model fairness from a causal perspective by comparing the predictions of each individual from the original data and the counterfactuals. In counterfactuals, the sensitive attribute values of this individual had been modified. Recently, a few works extend counterfactual fairness to graph data, but most of them neglect the following facts that can lead to biases: 1) the sensitive attributes of each node's neighbors may causally affect the prediction w.r.t. this node; 2) the sensitive attributes may causally affect other features and the graph structure. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel fairness notion - graph counterfactual fairness, which considers the biases led by the above facts. To learn node representations towards graph counterfactual fairness, we propose a novel framework based on counterfactual data augmentation. In this framework, we generate counterfactuals corresponding to perturbations on each node's and their neighbors' sensitive attributes. Then we enforce fairness by minimizing the discrepancy between the representations learned from the original graph and the counterfactuals for each node. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world graphs show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in graph counterfactual fairness, and also achieves comparable prediction performance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2006844
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10357530
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 695 to 703
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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There has been significant progress in improving the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) through enhancements in graph data, model architecture design, and training strategies. For fairness in graphs, recent studies achieve fair representations and predictions through either graph data pre-processing (e.g., node feature masking, and topology rewiring) or fair training strategies (e.g., regularization, adversarial debiasing, and fair contrastive learning). How to achieve fairness in graphs from the model architecture perspective is less explored. More importantly, GNNs exhibit worse fairness performance compared to multilayer perception since their model architecture (i.e., neighbor aggregation) amplifies biases. To this end, we aim to achieve fairness via a new GNN architecture. We propose Fair Message Passing (FMP) designed within a unified optimization framework for GNNs. Notably, FMP explicitly renders sensitive attribute usage in forward propagation for node classification task using cross-entropy loss without data pre-processing. In FMP, the aggregation is first adopted to utilize neighbors' information and then the bias mitigation step explicitly pushes demographic group node presentation centers together.In this way, FMP scheme can aggregate useful information from neighbors and mitigate bias to achieve better fairness and prediction tradeoff performance. Experiments on node classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed FMP outperforms several baselines in terms of fairness and accuracy on three real-world datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/zhimengj0326/FMP.
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Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for modeling graph data due to their ability to learn a concise representation of the data by integrating the node attributes and link information in a principled fashion. However, despite their promise, there are several practical challenges that must be overcome to effectively use them for node classification problems. In particular, current approaches are vulnerable to different kinds of biases inherent in the graph data. First, if the class distribution is imbalanced, then the GNNs' loss function is biased towards classifying the majority class correctly rather than the minority class, which hurts the performance of the latter class. Second, due to homophily effect, the learned representation and subsequent downstream tasks may favor certain demographic groups over others when applied to social network data. To mitigate such biases, we propose a novel framework called Fairness-Aware Cost Sensitive Graph Convolutional Network (FACS-GCN) for classifying nodes in networks with skewed class distributions. Our approach combines a cost-sensitive exponential loss with an adversarial learning component to alleviate the ill-effects of both biases. The framework employs a stagewise additive modeling approach to ensure there is no significant loss in accuracy when imparting fairness into the GNN. Experimental results on 6 benchmark graph data demonstrate the effectiveness of FACS-GCN against comparable baseline methods in terms of promoting fairness while maintaining a high model accuracy on the majority of the datasets.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3488560.3498391
