Understanding Fairness-Accuracy Trade-offs in Machine Learning Models: Does Promoting Fairness Undermine Performance?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Junhua, Lee, Roy Ka-Wei, Lim, Kwan Hui
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Liu, Junhua
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Lim, Kwan Hui
author_facet Liu, Junhua
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Lim, Kwan Hui
contents Fairness in both Machine Learning (ML) predictions and human decision-making is essential, yet both are susceptible to different forms of bias, such as algorithmic and data-driven in ML, and cognitive or subjective in humans. In this study, we examine fairness using a real-world university admissions dataset comprising 870 applicant profiles, leveraging three ML models: XGB, Bi-LSTM, and KNN, alongside BERT embeddings for textual features. To evaluate individual fairness, we introduce a consistency metric that quantifies agreement in decisions among ML models and human experts with diverse backgrounds. Our analysis reveals that ML models surpass human evaluators in fairness consistency by margins ranging from 14.08\% to 18.79\%. Our findings highlight the potential of using ML to enhance fairness in admissions while maintaining high accuracy, advocating a hybrid approach combining human judgement and ML models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_17374
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Fairness-Accuracy Trade-offs in Machine Learning Models: Does Promoting Fairness Undermine Performance?
Liu, Junhua
Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Lim, Kwan Hui
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Fairness in both Machine Learning (ML) predictions and human decision-making is essential, yet both are susceptible to different forms of bias, such as algorithmic and data-driven in ML, and cognitive or subjective in humans. In this study, we examine fairness using a real-world university admissions dataset comprising 870 applicant profiles, leveraging three ML models: XGB, Bi-LSTM, and KNN, alongside BERT embeddings for textual features. To evaluate individual fairness, we introduce a consistency metric that quantifies agreement in decisions among ML models and human experts with diverse backgrounds. Our analysis reveals that ML models surpass human evaluators in fairness consistency by margins ranging from 14.08\% to 18.79\%. Our findings highlight the potential of using ML to enhance fairness in admissions while maintaining high accuracy, advocating a hybrid approach combining human judgement and ML models.
title Understanding Fairness-Accuracy Trade-offs in Machine Learning Models: Does Promoting Fairness Undermine Performance?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.17374