Fairness-aware kidney exchange and kidney paired donation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Mingrui, Dai, Xiaowu, Li, Lexin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Mingrui
Dai, Xiaowu
Li, Lexin
author_facet Zhang, Mingrui
Dai, Xiaowu
Li, Lexin
contents The kidney paired donation (KPD) program provides an innovative solution to overcome incompatibility challenges in kidney transplants by matching incompatible donor-patient pairs and facilitating kidney exchanges. To address unequal access to transplant opportunities, there are two widely used fairness criteria: group fairness and individual fairness. However, these criteria do not consider protected patient features, which refer to characteristics legally or ethically recognized as needing protection from discrimination, such as race and gender. Motivated by the calibration principle in machine learning, we introduce a new fairness criterion: the matching outcome should be conditionally independent of the protected feature, given the sensitization level. We integrate this fairness criterion as a constraint within the KPD optimization framework and propose a computationally efficient solution using linearization strategies and column-generation methods. Theoretically, we analyze the associated price of fairness using random graph models. Empirically, we compare our fairness criterion with group fairness and individual fairness through both simulations and a real-data example.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06431
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fairness-aware kidney exchange and kidney paired donation
Zhang, Mingrui
Dai, Xiaowu
Li, Lexin
Methodology
Machine Learning
The kidney paired donation (KPD) program provides an innovative solution to overcome incompatibility challenges in kidney transplants by matching incompatible donor-patient pairs and facilitating kidney exchanges. To address unequal access to transplant opportunities, there are two widely used fairness criteria: group fairness and individual fairness. However, these criteria do not consider protected patient features, which refer to characteristics legally or ethically recognized as needing protection from discrimination, such as race and gender. Motivated by the calibration principle in machine learning, we introduce a new fairness criterion: the matching outcome should be conditionally independent of the protected feature, given the sensitization level. We integrate this fairness criterion as a constraint within the KPD optimization framework and propose a computationally efficient solution using linearization strategies and column-generation methods. Theoretically, we analyze the associated price of fairness using random graph models. Empirically, we compare our fairness criterion with group fairness and individual fairness through both simulations and a real-data example.
title Fairness-aware kidney exchange and kidney paired donation
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06431