skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Fairness in Ranking: From Values to Technical Choices and Back
In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into the design of algorithmic rankers, with contributions from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In this tutorial, we give a systematic overview of this work, offering a broad perspective that connects formalizations and algorithmic approaches across subfields. During the first part of the tutorial, we present a classification framework for fairness-enhancing interventions, along which we will then relate the technical methods. This framework allows us to unify the presentation of mitigation objectives and of algorithmic techniques to help meet those objectives or identify trade-offs. Next, we discuss fairness in score-based ranking and in supervised learning-to-rank. We conclude with recommendations for practitioners, to help them select a fair ranking method based on the requirements of their specific application domain.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1922658 1934464 1916505
PAR ID:
10437292
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
SIGMOD '23: Companion of the 2023 International Conference on Management of Data
Page Range / eLocation ID:
7 to 12
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into algorithmic rankers, with contributions coming from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In this survey we give a systematic overview of this work, offering a broad perspective that connects formalizations and algorithmic approaches across subfields. An important contribution of our work is in developing a common narrative around the value frameworks that motivate specific fairness-enhancing interventions in ranking. This allows us to unify the presentation of mitigation objectives and of algorithmic techniques to help meet those objectives or identify trade-offs. In the first part of this survey, we describe four classification frameworks for fairness-enhancing interventions, along which we relate the technical methods surveyed in this paper, discuss evaluation datasets, and present technical work on fairness in score-based ranking. In this second part of this survey, we present methods that incorporate fairness in supervised learning, and also give representative examples of recent work on fairness in recommendation and matchmaking systems. We also discuss evaluation frameworks for fair score-based ranking and fair learning-to-rank, and draw a set of recommendations for the evaluation of fair ranking methods. 
    more » « less
  2. In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into algorithmic rankers, with contributions coming from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In this survey we give a systematic overview of this work, offering a broad perspective that connects formalizations and algorithmic approaches across subfields. An important contribution of our work is in developing a common narrative around the value frameworks that motivate specific fairness-enhancing interventions in ranking. This allows us to unify the presentation of mitigation objectives and of algorithmic techniques to help meet those objectives or identify trade-offs. In this first part of this survey, we describe four classification frameworks for fairness-enhancing interventions, along which we relate the technical methods surveyed in this paper, discuss evaluation datasets, and present technical work on fairness in score-based ranking. In the second part of this survey, we present methods that incorporate fairness in supervised learning, and also give representative examples of recent work on fairness in recommendation and matchmaking systems. We also discuss evaluation frameworks for fair score-based ranking and fair learning-to-rank, and draw a set of recommendations for the evaluation of fair ranking methods. 
    more » « less
  3. Graph is a ubiquitous type of data that appears in many real-world applications, including social network analysis, recommendations and financial security. Important as it is, decades of research have developed plentiful computational models to mine graphs. Despite its prosperity, concerns with respect to the potential algorithmic discrimination have been grown recently. Algorithmic fairness on graphs, which aims to mitigate bias introduced or amplified during the graph mining process, is an attractive yet challenging research topic. The first challenge corresponds to the theoretical challenge, where the non-IID nature of graph data may not only invalidate the basic assumption behind many existing studies in fair machine learning, but also introduce new fairness definition(s) based on the inter-correlation between nodes rather than the existing fairness definition(s) in fair machine learning. The second challenge regarding its algorithmic aspect aims to understand how to balance the trade-off between model accuracy and fairness. This tutorial aims to (1) comprehensively review the state-of-the-art techniques to enforce algorithmic fairness on graphs and (2) enlighten the open challenges and future directions. We believe this tutorial could benefit researchers and practitioners from the areas of data mining, artificial intelligence and social science. 
    more » « less
  4. As recommender systems are prone to various biases, mitigation approaches are needed to ensure that recommendations are fair to various stakeholders. One particular concern in music recommendation is artist gender fairness. Recent work has shown that the gender imbalance in the sector translates to the output of music recommender systems, creating a feedback loop that can reinforce gender biases over time. In this work, we examine whether algorithmic strategies or user behavior are a greater contributor to ongoing improvement (or loss) in fairness as models are repeatedly re-trained on new user feedback data. We simulate this repeated process to investigate the effects of ranking strategies and user choice models on gender fairness metrics. We find re-ranking strategies have a greater effect than user choice models on recommendation fairness over time. 
    more » « less
  5. Ensuring fairness is crucial in developing modern algorithms and tests. To address potential biases and discrimination in algorithmic decision making, researchers have drawn insights from the test fairness literature, notably the work on differential algorithmic functioning (DAF) by Suk and Han. Nevertheless, the exploration of intersectionality in fairness investigations, within both test fairness and algorithmic fairness fields, is still relatively new. In this paper, we propose an extension of the DAF framework to include the concept of intersectionality. Similar to DAF, the proposed notion for intersectionality, which we term “interactive DAF,” leverages ideas from test fairness and algorithmic fairness. We also provide methods based on the generalized Mantel–Haenszel test, generalized logistic regression, and regularized group regression to detect DAF, interactive DAF, or other subtypes of DAF. Specifically, we employ regularized group regression with three different penalties and examine their performance via a simulation study. Finally, we demonstrate our intersectional DAF framework in real-world applications on grade retention and conditional cash transfer programs in education. 
    more » « less