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Main Authors: Xi, Xiaoyin, Yu, Zhe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11459
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author Xi, Xiaoyin
Yu, Zhe
author_facet Xi, Xiaoyin
Yu, Zhe
contents There has been a prevalence of applying AI software in both high-stakes public-sector and industrial contexts. However, the lack of transparency has raised concerns about whether these data-informed AI software decisions secure fairness against people of all racial, gender, or age groups. Despite extensive research on emerging fairness-aware AI software, up to now most efforts to solve this issue have been dedicated to binary classification tasks. Fairness in regression is relatively underexplored. In this work, we adopted a mutual information-based metric to assess separation violations. The metric is also extended so that it can be directly applied to both classification and regression problems with both binary and continuous sensitive attributes. Inspired by the Reweighing algorithm in fair classification, we proposed a FairReweighing pre-processing algorithm based on density estimation to ensure that the learned model satisfies the separation criterion. Theoretically, we show that the proposed FairReweighing algorithm can guarantee separation in the training data under a data independence assumption. Empirically, on both synthetic and real-world data, we show that FairReweighing outperforms existing state-of-the-art regression fairness solutions in terms of improving separation while maintaining high accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_11459
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FairReweighing: Density Estimation-Based Reweighing Framework for Improving Separation in Fair Regression
Xi, Xiaoyin
Yu, Zhe
Machine Learning
There has been a prevalence of applying AI software in both high-stakes public-sector and industrial contexts. However, the lack of transparency has raised concerns about whether these data-informed AI software decisions secure fairness against people of all racial, gender, or age groups. Despite extensive research on emerging fairness-aware AI software, up to now most efforts to solve this issue have been dedicated to binary classification tasks. Fairness in regression is relatively underexplored. In this work, we adopted a mutual information-based metric to assess separation violations. The metric is also extended so that it can be directly applied to both classification and regression problems with both binary and continuous sensitive attributes. Inspired by the Reweighing algorithm in fair classification, we proposed a FairReweighing pre-processing algorithm based on density estimation to ensure that the learned model satisfies the separation criterion. Theoretically, we show that the proposed FairReweighing algorithm can guarantee separation in the training data under a data independence assumption. Empirically, on both synthetic and real-world data, we show that FairReweighing outperforms existing state-of-the-art regression fairness solutions in terms of improving separation while maintaining high accuracy.
title FairReweighing: Density Estimation-Based Reweighing Framework for Improving Separation in Fair Regression
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11459