Extending Fair Null-Space Projections for Continuous Attributes to Kernel Methods

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Störck, Felix, Hinder, Fabian, Hammer, Barbara
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Störck, Felix
Hinder, Fabian
Hammer, Barbara
author_facet Störck, Felix
Hinder, Fabian
Hammer, Barbara
contents With the on-going integration of machine learning systems into the everyday social life of millions the notion of fairness becomes an ever increasing priority in their development. Fairness notions commonly rely on protected attributes to assess potential biases. Here, the majority of literature focuses on discrete setups regarding both target and protected attributes. The literature on continuous attributes especially in conjunction with regression -- we refer to this as \emph{continuous fairness} -- is scarce. A common strategy is iterative null-space projection which as of now has only been explored for linear models or embeddings such as obtained by a non-linear encoder. We improve on this by generalizing to kernel methods, significantly extending the scope. This yields a model and fairness-score agnostic method for kernel embeddings applicable to continuous protected attributes. We demonstrate that our novel approach in conjunction with Support Vector Regression (SVR) provides competitive or improved performance across multiple datasets in comparisons to other contemporary methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03304
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extending Fair Null-Space Projections for Continuous Attributes to Kernel Methods
Störck, Felix
Hinder, Fabian
Hammer, Barbara
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
With the on-going integration of machine learning systems into the everyday social life of millions the notion of fairness becomes an ever increasing priority in their development. Fairness notions commonly rely on protected attributes to assess potential biases. Here, the majority of literature focuses on discrete setups regarding both target and protected attributes. The literature on continuous attributes especially in conjunction with regression -- we refer to this as \emph{continuous fairness} -- is scarce. A common strategy is iterative null-space projection which as of now has only been explored for linear models or embeddings such as obtained by a non-linear encoder. We improve on this by generalizing to kernel methods, significantly extending the scope. This yields a model and fairness-score agnostic method for kernel embeddings applicable to continuous protected attributes. We demonstrate that our novel approach in conjunction with Support Vector Regression (SVR) provides competitive or improved performance across multiple datasets in comparisons to other contemporary methods.
title Extending Fair Null-Space Projections for Continuous Attributes to Kernel Methods
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03304