Simulating Biases for Interpretable Fairness in Offline and Online Classifiers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Inácio, Ricardo, Kokkinogenis, Zafeiris, Cerqueira, Vitor, Soares, Carlos
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Inácio, Ricardo
Kokkinogenis, Zafeiris
Cerqueira, Vitor
Soares, Carlos
author_facet Inácio, Ricardo
Kokkinogenis, Zafeiris
Cerqueira, Vitor
Soares, Carlos
contents Predictive models often reinforce biases which were originally embedded in their training data, through skewed decisions. In such cases, mitigation methods are critical to ensure that, regardless of the prevailing disparities, model outcomes are adjusted to be fair. To assess this, datasets could be systematically generated with specific biases, to train machine learning classifiers. Then, predictive outcomes could aid in the understanding of this bias embedding process. Hence, an agent-based model (ABM), depicting a loan application process that represents various systemic biases across two demographic groups, was developed to produce synthetic datasets. Then, by applying classifiers trained on them to predict loan outcomes, we can assess how biased data leads to unfairness. This highlights a main contribution of this work: a framework for synthetic dataset generation with controllable bias injection. We also contribute with a novel explainability technique, which shows how mitigations affect the way classifiers leverage data features, via second-order Shapley values. In experiments, both offline and online learning approaches are employed. Mitigations are applied at different stages of the modelling pipeline, such as during pre-processing and in-processing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10154
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulating Biases for Interpretable Fairness in Offline and Online Classifiers
Inácio, Ricardo
Kokkinogenis, Zafeiris
Cerqueira, Vitor
Soares, Carlos
Machine Learning
Predictive models often reinforce biases which were originally embedded in their training data, through skewed decisions. In such cases, mitigation methods are critical to ensure that, regardless of the prevailing disparities, model outcomes are adjusted to be fair. To assess this, datasets could be systematically generated with specific biases, to train machine learning classifiers. Then, predictive outcomes could aid in the understanding of this bias embedding process. Hence, an agent-based model (ABM), depicting a loan application process that represents various systemic biases across two demographic groups, was developed to produce synthetic datasets. Then, by applying classifiers trained on them to predict loan outcomes, we can assess how biased data leads to unfairness. This highlights a main contribution of this work: a framework for synthetic dataset generation with controllable bias injection. We also contribute with a novel explainability technique, which shows how mitigations affect the way classifiers leverage data features, via second-order Shapley values. In experiments, both offline and online learning approaches are employed. Mitigations are applied at different stages of the modelling pipeline, such as during pre-processing and in-processing.
title Simulating Biases for Interpretable Fairness in Offline and Online Classifiers
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10154