FaiREE: Fair Classification with Finite-Sample and Distribution-Free Guarantee

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Puheng, Zou, James, Zhang, Linjun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Li, Puheng
Zou, James
Zhang, Linjun
author_facet Li, Puheng
Zou, James
Zhang, Linjun
contents Algorithmic fairness plays an increasingly critical role in machine learning research. Several group fairness notions and algorithms have been proposed. However, the fairness guarantee of existing fair classification methods mainly depends on specific data distributional assumptions, often requiring large sample sizes, and fairness could be violated when there is a modest number of samples, which is often the case in practice. In this paper, we propose FaiREE, a fair classification algorithm that can satisfy group fairness constraints with finite-sample and distribution-free theoretical guarantees. FaiREE can be adapted to satisfy various group fairness notions (e.g., Equality of Opportunity, Equalized Odds, Demographic Parity, etc.) and achieve the optimal accuracy. These theoretical guarantees are further supported by experiments on both synthetic and real data. FaiREE is shown to have favorable performance over state-of-the-art algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_15072
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FaiREE: Fair Classification with Finite-Sample and Distribution-Free Guarantee
Li, Puheng
Zou, James
Zhang, Linjun
Machine Learning
Algorithmic fairness plays an increasingly critical role in machine learning research. Several group fairness notions and algorithms have been proposed. However, the fairness guarantee of existing fair classification methods mainly depends on specific data distributional assumptions, often requiring large sample sizes, and fairness could be violated when there is a modest number of samples, which is often the case in practice. In this paper, we propose FaiREE, a fair classification algorithm that can satisfy group fairness constraints with finite-sample and distribution-free theoretical guarantees. FaiREE can be adapted to satisfy various group fairness notions (e.g., Equality of Opportunity, Equalized Odds, Demographic Parity, etc.) and achieve the optimal accuracy. These theoretical guarantees are further supported by experiments on both synthetic and real data. FaiREE is shown to have favorable performance over state-of-the-art algorithms.
title FaiREE: Fair Classification with Finite-Sample and Distribution-Free Guarantee
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15072