ABCFair: an Adaptable Benchmark approach for Comparing Fairness Methods

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Defrance, MaryBeth, Buyl, Maarten, De Bie, Tijl
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Defrance, MaryBeth
Buyl, Maarten
De Bie, Tijl
author_facet Defrance, MaryBeth
Buyl, Maarten
De Bie, Tijl
contents Numerous methods have been implemented that pursue fairness with respect to sensitive features by mitigating biases in machine learning. Yet, the problem settings that each method tackles vary significantly, including the stage of intervention, the composition of sensitive features, the fairness notion, and the distribution of the output. Even in binary classification, these subtle differences make it highly complicated to benchmark fairness methods, as their performance can strongly depend on exactly how the bias mitigation problem was originally framed. Hence, we introduce ABCFair, a benchmark approach which allows adapting to the desiderata of the real-world problem setting, enabling proper comparability between methods for any use case. We apply ABCFair to a range of pre-, in-, and postprocessing methods on both large-scale, traditional datasets and on a dual label (biased and unbiased) dataset to sidestep the fairness-accuracy trade-off.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_16965
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ABCFair: an Adaptable Benchmark approach for Comparing Fairness Methods
Defrance, MaryBeth
Buyl, Maarten
De Bie, Tijl
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Numerous methods have been implemented that pursue fairness with respect to sensitive features by mitigating biases in machine learning. Yet, the problem settings that each method tackles vary significantly, including the stage of intervention, the composition of sensitive features, the fairness notion, and the distribution of the output. Even in binary classification, these subtle differences make it highly complicated to benchmark fairness methods, as their performance can strongly depend on exactly how the bias mitigation problem was originally framed. Hence, we introduce ABCFair, a benchmark approach which allows adapting to the desiderata of the real-world problem setting, enabling proper comparability between methods for any use case. We apply ABCFair to a range of pre-, in-, and postprocessing methods on both large-scale, traditional datasets and on a dual label (biased and unbiased) dataset to sidestep the fairness-accuracy trade-off.
title ABCFair: an Adaptable Benchmark approach for Comparing Fairness Methods
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16965