Fair Graph Machine Learning under Adversarial Missingness Processes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lina, Debolina Halder, Silva, Arlei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Lina, Debolina Halder
Silva, Arlei
author_facet Lina, Debolina Halder
Silva, Arlei
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in many relevant tasks where decisions might disproportionately impact specific communities. However, existing work on fair GNNs often assumes that either sensitive attributes are fully observed or they are missing completely at random. We show that an adversarial missingness process can inadvertently disguise a fair model through the imputation, leading the model to overestimate the fairness of its predictions. We address this challenge by proposing Better Fair than Sorry (BFtS), a fair missing data imputation model for sensitive attributes. The key principle behind BFtS is that imputations should approximate the worst-case scenario for fairness -- i.e. when optimizing fairness is the hardest. We implement this idea using a 3-player adversarial scheme where two adversaries collaborate against a GNN classifier, and the classifier minimizes the maximum bias. Experiments using synthetic and real datasets show that BFtS often achieves a better fairness x accuracy trade-off than existing alternatives under an adversarial missingness process.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_01591
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fair Graph Machine Learning under Adversarial Missingness Processes
Lina, Debolina Halder
Silva, Arlei
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in many relevant tasks where decisions might disproportionately impact specific communities. However, existing work on fair GNNs often assumes that either sensitive attributes are fully observed or they are missing completely at random. We show that an adversarial missingness process can inadvertently disguise a fair model through the imputation, leading the model to overestimate the fairness of its predictions. We address this challenge by proposing Better Fair than Sorry (BFtS), a fair missing data imputation model for sensitive attributes. The key principle behind BFtS is that imputations should approximate the worst-case scenario for fairness -- i.e. when optimizing fairness is the hardest. We implement this idea using a 3-player adversarial scheme where two adversaries collaborate against a GNN classifier, and the classifier minimizes the maximum bias. Experiments using synthetic and real datasets show that BFtS often achieves a better fairness x accuracy trade-off than existing alternatives under an adversarial missingness process.
title Fair Graph Machine Learning under Adversarial Missingness Processes
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01591