Fairness-aware learning studies the problem of building machine learning models that are subject to fairness requirements. Counterfactual fairness is a notion of fairness derived from Pearl's causal model, which considers a model is fair if for a particular individual or group its prediction in the real world is the same as that in the counterfactual world where the individual(s) had belonged to a different demographic group. However, an inherent limitation of counterfactual fairness is that it cannot be uniquely quantified from the observational data in certain situations, due to the unidentifiability of the counterfactual quantity. In this paper, we address this limitation by mathematically bounding the unidentifiable counterfactual quantity, and develop a theoretically sound algorithm for constructing counterfactually fair classifiers. We evaluate our method in the experiments using both synthetic and real-world datasets, as well as compare with existing methods. The results validate our theory and show the effectiveness of our method.
Achieving Counterfactual Fairness for Anomaly Detection
Ensuring fairness in anomaly detection models has received much attention recently as many anomaly detection applications involve human beings. However, existing fair anomaly detection approaches mainly focus on association-based fairness notions. In this work, we target counterfactual fairness, which is a prevalent causation-based fairness notion. The goal of counterfactually fair anomaly detection is to ensure that the detection outcome of an individual in the factual world is the same as that in the counterfactual world where the individual had belonged to a different group. To this end, we propose a counterfactually fair anomaly detection (CFAD) framework which consists of two phases, counterfactual data generation and fair anomaly detection. Experimental results on a synthetic dataset and two real datasets show that CFAD can effectively detect anomalies as well as ensure counterfactual fairness.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1910284
- PAR ID:
- 10464679
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2023
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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.more » « less
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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.more » « less
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A recent trend of fair machine learning is to define fairness as causality-based notions which concern the causal connection between protected attributes and decisions. However, one common challenge of all causality-based fairness notions is identifiability, i.e., whether they can be uniquely measured from observational data, which is a critical barrier to applying these notions to real-world situations. In this paper, we develop a framework for measuring different causality-based fairness. We propose a unified definition that covers most of previous causality-based fairness notions, namely the path-specific counterfactual fairness (PC fairness). Based on that, we propose a general method in the form of a constrained optimization problem for bounding the path-specific counterfactual fairness under all unidentifiable situations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the correctness and effectiveness of our method.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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