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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown superior performance in analyzing attributed networks in various web-based applications such as social recommendation and web search. Nevertheless, in high-stake decision-making scenarios such as online fraud detection, there is an increasing societal concern that GNNs could make discriminatory decisions towards certain demographic groups. Despite recent explorations on fair GNNs, these works are tailored for a specific GNN model. However, myriads of GNN variants have been proposed for different applications, and it is costly to fine-tune existing debiasing algorithms for each specific GNN architecture. Different from existing works that debias GNN models, we aim to debias the input attributed network to achieve fairer GNNs through feeding GNNs with less biased data. Specifically, we propose novel definitions and metrics to measure the bias in an attributed network, which leads to the optimization objective to mitigate bias. We then develop a framework EDITS to mitigate the bias in attributed networks while maintaining the performance of GNNs in downstream tasks. EDITS works in a model-agnostic manner, i.e., it is independent of any specific GNN. Experiments demonstrate the validity of the proposed bias metrics and the superiority of EDITS on both bias mitigation and utility maintenance. Open-source implementation: https://github.com/yushundong/EDITS.
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PyGDebias: A Python Library for Debiasing in Graph Learning
Graph-structured data is ubiquitous among a plethora of real-world applications. However, as graph learning algorithms have been increasingly deployed to help decision-making, there has been rising societal concern in the bias these algorithms may exhibit. In certain high-stake decision-making scenarios, the decisions made may be life-changing for the involved individuals. Accordingly, abundant explorations have been made to mitigate the bias for graph learning algorithms in recent years. However, there still lacks a library to collectively consolidate existing debiasing techniques and help practitioners to easily perform bias mitigation for graph learning algorithms. In this paper, we present PyGDebias, an open-source Python library for bias mitigation in graph learning algorithms. As the first comprehensive library of its kind, PyGDebias covers 13 popular debiasing methods under common fairness notions together with 26 commonly used graph datasets. In addition, PyGDebias also comes with comprehensive performance benchmarks and well-documented API designs for both researchers and practitioners. To foster convenient accessibility, PyGDebias is released under a permissive BSD-license together with performance benchmarks, API documentation, and use examples at https://github.com/yushundong/PyGDebias.
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- PAR ID:
- 10514285
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024
- ISBN:
- 9798400701726
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1019 to 1022
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Singapore Singapore
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3589335.3651239
