Achieving Non-Discrimination in Prediction
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
2018
Keywords
Machine Learning, Classification, Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications, Philosophical and Ethical Issues, Humans and AI, Ethical Issues in AI
Abstract
In discrimination-aware classification, the pre-process methods for constructing a discrimination-free classifier first remove discrimination from the training data, and then learn the classifier from the cleaned data. However, they lack a theoretical guarantee for the potential discrimination when the classifier is deployed for prediction. In this paper, we fill this gap by mathematically bounding the discrimination in prediction. We adopt the causal model for modeling the data generation mechanism, and formally defining discrimination in population, in a dataset, and in prediction. We obtain two important theoretical results: (1) the discrimination in prediction can still exist even if the discrimination in the training data is completely removed; and (2) not all pre-process methods can ensure non-discrimination in prediction even though they can achieve non-discrimination in the modified training data. Based on the results, we develop a two-phase framework for constructing a discrimination-free classifier with a theoretical guarantee. The experiments demonstrate the theoretical results and show the effectiveness of our two-phase framework.
Citation
L. Zhang, Y. Wu and X. Wu. "Achieving Non-Discrimination in Prediction". Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Stockholm, Sweden, July 13-19, 2018. doi:10.24963/ijcai.2018/430
Comments
Principal Investigator: Xintao Wu
Acknowledgements: This work was supported in part by NSF 1646654.