FairGE: Fairness-Aware Graph Encoding in Incomplete Social Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Luo, Renqiang, Huang, Huafei, Tang, Tao, Ren, Jing, Xu, Ziqi, Hou, Mingliang, Dai, Enyan, Xia, Feng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Luo, Renqiang
Huang, Huafei
Tang, Tao
Ren, Jing
Xu, Ziqi
Hou, Mingliang
Dai, Enyan
Xia, Feng
author_facet Luo, Renqiang
Huang, Huafei
Tang, Tao
Ren, Jing
Xu, Ziqi
Hou, Mingliang
Dai, Enyan
Xia, Feng
contents Graph Transformers (GTs) are increasingly applied to social network analysis, yet their deployment is often constrained by fairness concerns. This issue is particularly critical in incomplete social networks, where sensitive attributes are frequently missing due to privacy and ethical restrictions. Existing solutions commonly generate these incomplete attributes, which may introduce additional biases and further compromise user privacy. To address this challenge, FairGE (Fair Graph Encoding) is introduced as a fairness-aware framework for GTs in incomplete social networks. Instead of generating sensitive attributes, FairGE encodes fairness directly through spectral graph theory. By leveraging the principal eigenvector to represent structural information and padding incomplete sensitive attributes with zeros to maintain independence, FairGE ensures fairness without data reconstruction. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the method suppresses the influence of non-principal spectral components, thereby enhancing fairness. Extensive experiments on seven real-world social network datasets confirm that FairGE achieves at least a 16% improvement in both statistical parity and equality of opportunity compared with state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is shown in https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/FairGE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_09394
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FairGE: Fairness-Aware Graph Encoding in Incomplete Social Networks
Luo, Renqiang
Huang, Huafei
Tang, Tao
Ren, Jing
Xu, Ziqi
Hou, Mingliang
Dai, Enyan
Xia, Feng
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
Graph Transformers (GTs) are increasingly applied to social network analysis, yet their deployment is often constrained by fairness concerns. This issue is particularly critical in incomplete social networks, where sensitive attributes are frequently missing due to privacy and ethical restrictions. Existing solutions commonly generate these incomplete attributes, which may introduce additional biases and further compromise user privacy. To address this challenge, FairGE (Fair Graph Encoding) is introduced as a fairness-aware framework for GTs in incomplete social networks. Instead of generating sensitive attributes, FairGE encodes fairness directly through spectral graph theory. By leveraging the principal eigenvector to represent structural information and padding incomplete sensitive attributes with zeros to maintain independence, FairGE ensures fairness without data reconstruction. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the method suppresses the influence of non-principal spectral components, thereby enhancing fairness. Extensive experiments on seven real-world social network datasets confirm that FairGE achieves at least a 16% improvement in both statistical parity and equality of opportunity compared with state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is shown in https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/FairGE.
title FairGE: Fairness-Aware Graph Encoding in Incomplete Social Networks
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09394