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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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Fair Representation Learning: An Alternative to Mutual Information
Learning fair representations is an essential task to reduce bias in data-oriented decision making. It protects minority subgroups by requiring the learned representations to be independent of sensitive attributes. To achieve independence, the vast majority of the existing work primarily relaxes it to the minimization of the mutual information between sensitive attributes and learned representations. However, direct computation of mutual information is computationally intractable, and various upper bounds currently used either are still intractable or contradict the utility of the learned representations. In this paper, we introduce distance covariance as a new dependence measure into fair representation learning. By observing that sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, and age group) are typically categorical, the distance covariance can be converted to a tractable penalty term without contradicting the utility desideratum. Based on the tractable penalty, we propose FairDisCo, a variational method to learn fair representations. Experiments demonstrate that FairDisCo outperforms existing competitors for fair representation learning.
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- PAR ID:
- 10380838
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- KDD
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1088 to 1097
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3534678.3539302
