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This content will become publicly available on December 17, 2023

Title: InfoFair: Information-Theoretic Intersectional Fairness
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2134079 1939725 1947135
NSF-PAR ID:
10428928
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1455 to 1464
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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