论文标题

因果多层次公平

Causal Multi-Level Fairness

论文作者

Mhasawade, Vishwali, Chunara, Rumi

论文摘要

已知算法系统会严重影响边缘化群体,并且如果不考虑所有偏见来源,则更是如此。虽然算法公平的工作迄今主要是由于单独链接的属性而主要着重于解决歧视,但社会科学研究阐明了我们如何将我们链接到个人的某些属性被概念化为在宏(例如结构性)层面上具有原因,并且可能很重要对于在多个级别上很重要。例如,与其简单地将种族视为个人的因果,受保护的属性,不如将其作为感知的种族歧视而蒸馏而来,而个人的经历可能会受到邻里水平因素的影响。这种多层次的概念化与公平性问题有关,因为如果个人属于另一个人口组,也重要的是要考虑到个人在宏观层面上接受优于优势的待遇。在本文中,我们使用因果推论的工具以一种允许人们评估和说明多个级别的敏感属性的影响的方式对多层次公平性的问题进行正式化。如果没有考虑到宏观级敏感属性,或者不考虑其多级别的性质,我们可以通过说明剩余的不公平来显示问题的重要性。此外,在基于宏观和个人级别属性预测收入的现实世界任务的背景下,我们展示了一种减轻不公平性的方法,这是多级敏感属性的结果。

Algorithmic systems are known to impact marginalized groups severely, and more so, if all sources of bias are not considered. While work in algorithmic fairness to-date has primarily focused on addressing discrimination due to individually linked attributes, social science research elucidates how some properties we link to individuals can be conceptualized as having causes at macro (e.g. structural) levels, and it may be important to be fair to attributes at multiple levels. For example, instead of simply considering race as a causal, protected attribute of an individual, the cause may be distilled as perceived racial discrimination an individual experiences, which in turn can be affected by neighborhood-level factors. This multi-level conceptualization is relevant to questions of fairness, as it may not only be important to take into account if the individual belonged to another demographic group, but also if the individual received advantaged treatment at the macro-level. In this paper, we formalize the problem of multi-level fairness using tools from causal inference in a manner that allows one to assess and account for effects of sensitive attributes at multiple levels. We show importance of the problem by illustrating residual unfairness if macro-level sensitive attributes are not accounted for, or included without accounting for their multi-level nature. Further, in the context of a real-world task of predicting income based on macro and individual-level attributes, we demonstrate an approach for mitigating unfairness, a result of multi-level sensitive attributes.

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