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Recycling privileged learning and distribution matching for fairness

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conference contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 08:44 authored by Novi QuadriantoNovi Quadrianto, Viktoriia SharmanskaViktoriia Sharmanska
Equipping machine learning models with ethical and legal constraints is a serious issue; without this, the future of machine learning is at risk. This paper takes a step forward in this direction and focuses on ensuring machine learning models deliver fair decisions. In legal scholarships, the notion of fairness itself is evolving and multi-faceted. We set an overarching goal to develop a unified machine learning framework that is able to handle any definitions of fairness, their combinations, and also new definitions that might be stipulated in the future. To achieve our goal, we recycle two well-established machine learning techniques, privileged learning and distribution matching, and harmonize them for satisfying multi-faceted fairness definitions. We consider protected characteristics such as race and gender as privileged information that is available at training but not at test time; this accelerates model training and delivers fairness through unawareness. Further, we cast demographic parity, equalized odds, and equality of opportunity as a classical two-sample problem of conditional distributions, which can be solved in a general form by using distance measures in Hilbert Space. We show several existing models are special cases of ours. Finally, we advocate returning the Pareto frontier of multi-objective minimization of error and unfairness in predictions. This will facilitate decision makers to select an operating point and to be accountable for it.

Funding

EthicalML: Injecting Ethical and Legal Constraints into Machine Learning Models; G2034; EPSRC-ENGINEERING & PHYSICAL SCIENCES RESEARCH COUNCIL

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NIPS 2017)

Publisher

Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation

Page range

1-12

Event name

31st Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Event location

Long Beach, California, US

Event type

conference

Event date

4-9 December 2017

Place of publication

Red Hook, NY

Department affiliated with

  • Informatics Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Data Science Research Group Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-11-08

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-11-09

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-11-08

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