论文标题
在算法决策中执行集团公平性:实用性最大化
Enforcing Group Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making: Utility Maximization Under Sufficiency
论文作者
论文摘要
默认情况下,二进制决策分类器不公平。公平要求是决策基本原理的另一个要素,这通常是通过最大化某些效用功能来驱动的。从这个意义上讲,算法公平性可以作为约束优化问题提出。本文有助于讨论如何实施公平性,重点关注积极预测价值(PPV)均衡的公平概念,虚假的遗漏率(For)均等和足够的能力(结合了前两个)。我们表明,特定于组的阈值规则对于PPV均等和奇偶校验是最佳的,类似于其他团体公平标准的众所周知的结果。但是,根据潜在的人口分布和效用函数,我们发现有时一组的上限阈值规则是最佳的:在PPV平价(或平等)下的实用性最大化可能会导致选择一个组最小的一组效用的个体,而不是选择最有前途的个人。该结果是违反直觉的,与统计平等和机会平等的类似解决方案相反。我们还为满足公平限制足够的最佳决策规则提供了解决方案。我们表明,需要更复杂的决策规则,这导致了除一个群体以外的所有人外的组内不公平。我们根据模拟和真实数据说明了我们的发现。
Binary decision making classifiers are not fair by default. Fairness requirements are an additional element to the decision making rationale, which is typically driven by maximizing some utility function. In that sense, algorithmic fairness can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem. This paper contributes to the discussion on how to implement fairness, focusing on the fairness concepts of positive predictive value (PPV) parity, false omission rate (FOR) parity, and sufficiency (which combines the former two). We show that group-specific threshold rules are optimal for PPV parity and FOR parity, similar to well-known results for other group fairness criteria. However, depending on the underlying population distributions and the utility function, we find that sometimes an upper-bound threshold rule for one group is optimal: utility maximization under PPV parity (or FOR parity) might thus lead to selecting the individuals with the smallest utility for one group, instead of selecting the most promising individuals. This result is counter-intuitive and in contrast to the analogous solutions for statistical parity and equality of opportunity. We also provide a solution for the optimal decision rules satisfying the fairness constraint sufficiency. We show that more complex decision rules are required and that this leads to within-group unfairness for all but one of the groups. We illustrate our findings based on simulated and real data.