"Patriarchy Hurts Men Too." Does Your Model Agree? A Discussion on Fairness Assumptions

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Hauptverfasser: Favier, Marco, Calders, Toon
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Favier, Marco
Calders, Toon
author_facet Favier, Marco
Calders, Toon
contents The pipeline of a fair ML practitioner is generally divided into three phases: 1) Selecting a fairness measure. 2) Choosing a model that minimizes this measure. 3) Maximizing the model's performance on the data. In the context of group fairness, this approach often obscures implicit assumptions about how bias is introduced into the data. For instance, in binary classification, it is often assumed that the best model, with equal fairness, is the one with better performance. However, this belief already imposes specific properties on the process that introduced bias. More precisely, we are already assuming that the biasing process is a monotonic function of the fair scores, dependent solely on the sensitive attribute. We formally prove this claim regarding several implicit fairness assumptions. This leads, in our view, to two possible conclusions: either the behavior of the biasing process is more complex than mere monotonicity, which means we need to identify and reject our implicit assumptions in order to develop models capable of tackling more complex situations; or the bias introduced in the data behaves predictably, implying that many of the developed models are superfluous.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_00330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle "Patriarchy Hurts Men Too." Does Your Model Agree? A Discussion on Fairness Assumptions
Favier, Marco
Calders, Toon
Machine Learning
The pipeline of a fair ML practitioner is generally divided into three phases: 1) Selecting a fairness measure. 2) Choosing a model that minimizes this measure. 3) Maximizing the model's performance on the data. In the context of group fairness, this approach often obscures implicit assumptions about how bias is introduced into the data. For instance, in binary classification, it is often assumed that the best model, with equal fairness, is the one with better performance. However, this belief already imposes specific properties on the process that introduced bias. More precisely, we are already assuming that the biasing process is a monotonic function of the fair scores, dependent solely on the sensitive attribute. We formally prove this claim regarding several implicit fairness assumptions. This leads, in our view, to two possible conclusions: either the behavior of the biasing process is more complex than mere monotonicity, which means we need to identify and reject our implicit assumptions in order to develop models capable of tackling more complex situations; or the bias introduced in the data behaves predictably, implying that many of the developed models are superfluous.
title "Patriarchy Hurts Men Too." Does Your Model Agree? A Discussion on Fairness Assumptions
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00330