A Unifying Human-Centered AI Fairness Framework

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rahman, Munshi Mahbubur, Pan, Shimei, Foulds, James R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rahman, Munshi Mahbubur
Pan, Shimei
Foulds, James R.
author_facet Rahman, Munshi Mahbubur
Pan, Shimei
Foulds, James R.
contents The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in critical societal domains has amplified concerns about fairness, particularly regarding unequal treatment across sensitive attributes such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status. While there has been substantial work on ensuring AI fairness, navigating trade-offs between competing notions of fairness as well as predictive accuracy remains challenging, creating barriers to the practical deployment of fair AI systems. To address this, we introduce a unifying human-centered fairness framework that systematically covers eight distinct fairness metrics, formed by combining individual and group fairness, infra-marginal and intersectional assumptions, and outcome-based and equality-of-opportunity (EOO) perspectives. This structure allows stakeholders to align fairness interventions with their values and contextual considerations. The framework uses a consistent and easy-to-understand formulation for all metrics to reduce the learning curve for non-experts. Rather than privileging a single fairness notion, the framework enables stakeholders to assign weights across multiple fairness objectives, reflecting their priorities and facilitating multi-stakeholder compromises. We apply this approach to four real-world datasets: the UCI Adult census dataset for income prediction, the COMPAS dataset for criminal recidivism, the German Credit dataset for credit risk assessment, and the MEPS dataset for healthcare utilization. We show that adjusting weights reveals nuanced trade-offs between different fairness metrics. Finally, through case studies in judicial decision-making and healthcare, we demonstrate how the framework can inform practical and value-sensitive deployment of fair AI systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06944
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Unifying Human-Centered AI Fairness Framework
Rahman, Munshi Mahbubur
Pan, Shimei
Foulds, James R.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in critical societal domains has amplified concerns about fairness, particularly regarding unequal treatment across sensitive attributes such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status. While there has been substantial work on ensuring AI fairness, navigating trade-offs between competing notions of fairness as well as predictive accuracy remains challenging, creating barriers to the practical deployment of fair AI systems. To address this, we introduce a unifying human-centered fairness framework that systematically covers eight distinct fairness metrics, formed by combining individual and group fairness, infra-marginal and intersectional assumptions, and outcome-based and equality-of-opportunity (EOO) perspectives. This structure allows stakeholders to align fairness interventions with their values and contextual considerations. The framework uses a consistent and easy-to-understand formulation for all metrics to reduce the learning curve for non-experts. Rather than privileging a single fairness notion, the framework enables stakeholders to assign weights across multiple fairness objectives, reflecting their priorities and facilitating multi-stakeholder compromises. We apply this approach to four real-world datasets: the UCI Adult census dataset for income prediction, the COMPAS dataset for criminal recidivism, the German Credit dataset for credit risk assessment, and the MEPS dataset for healthcare utilization. We show that adjusting weights reveals nuanced trade-offs between different fairness metrics. Finally, through case studies in judicial decision-making and healthcare, we demonstrate how the framework can inform practical and value-sensitive deployment of fair AI systems.
title A Unifying Human-Centered AI Fairness Framework
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06944