论文标题
平等的改进能力:考虑长期影响的新公平概念
Equal Improvability: A New Fairness Notion Considering the Long-term Impact
论文作者
论文摘要
设计一个不歧视不同群体的公平分类器是机器学习的重要问题。尽管研究人员提出了各种定义群体公平的方式,但其中大多数仅着眼于直接公平,而忽略了公平分类器在动态场景下的长期影响,在这种情况下,每个人都可以随着时间的推移改善其功能。这种动态的场景发生在现实世界中,例如大学录取和信用贷款,每个拒绝的样本都会努力更改其功能以后被接受。在这种动态环境中,长期公平应在拒绝的样本做出一些努力以改进之后均衡样本的特征分布。为了促进长期公平性,我们提出了一个称为同等改进能力(EI)的新公平概念,该概念在每个被拒绝的样本中都将花费有界水平的努力,将被拒绝的样本的潜在接受率平等。我们通过现有的公平概念分析了EI及其连接的属性。为了找到满足EI需求的分类器,我们提出并研究了解决EI-regultial优化问题的三种不同方法。通过对合成数据集和真实数据集的实验,我们证明了所提出的EI型算法鼓励我们根据EI找到一个公平的分类器。最后,我们为动态场景提供了实验结果,这些结果强调了我们EI指标在实现长期公平性方面的优势。代码可在GitHub存储库中获得,请参见https://github.com/guldoganozgur/ei_fairness。
Devising a fair classifier that does not discriminate against different groups is an important problem in machine learning. Although researchers have proposed various ways of defining group fairness, most of them only focused on the immediate fairness, ignoring the long-term impact of a fair classifier under the dynamic scenario where each individual can improve its feature over time. Such dynamic scenarios happen in real world, e.g., college admission and credit loaning, where each rejected sample makes effort to change its features to get accepted afterwards. In this dynamic setting, the long-term fairness should equalize the samples' feature distribution across different groups after the rejected samples make some effort to improve. In order to promote long-term fairness, we propose a new fairness notion called Equal Improvability (EI), which equalizes the potential acceptance rate of the rejected samples across different groups assuming a bounded level of effort will be spent by each rejected sample. We analyze the properties of EI and its connections with existing fairness notions. To find a classifier that satisfies the EI requirement, we propose and study three different approaches that solve EI-regularized optimization problems. Through experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed EI-regularized algorithms encourage us to find a fair classifier in terms of EI. Finally, we provide experimental results on dynamic scenarios which highlight the advantages of our EI metric in achieving the long-term fairness. Codes are available in a GitHub repository, see https://github.com/guldoganozgur/ei_fairness.