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Abstracting Fairness: Oracles, Metrics, and Interpretability

Authors Cynthia Dwork, Christina Ilvento, Guy N. Rothblum, Pragya Sur

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Author Details

Cynthia Dwork
  • Harvard John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, MA, USA
  • Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA, USA
  • Microsoft Research, Mountain View, CA, USA
Christina Ilvento
  • Harvard John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, MA, USA
Guy N. Rothblum
  • Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Pragya Sur
  • Harvard University, Center for Research on Computation and Society, Cambridge, MA, USA

Funding

  • Dwork, Cynthia: This research was supported in part by NSF grant CCF-1763665 and Microsoft Research.
  • Ilvento, Christina: This work was supported by Microsoft Research and the Sloan Foundation.
  • Rothblum, Guy N.: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 819702), the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 5219/17), and Microsoft Research.
  • Sur, Pragya: This research was supported by the Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and in part by Microsoft Research.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted, in part, while the authors were at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley.

Cite As Get BibTex

Cynthia Dwork, Christina Ilvento, Guy N. Rothblum, and Pragya Sur. Abstracting Fairness: Oracles, Metrics, and Interpretability. In 1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 156, pp. 8:1-8:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.8

Abstract

It is well understood that classification algorithms, for example, for deciding on loan applications, cannot be evaluated for fairness without taking context into account. We examine what can be learned from a fairness oracle equipped with an underlying understanding of "true" fairness. The oracle takes as input a (context, classifier) pair satisfying an arbitrary fairness definition, and accepts or rejects the pair according to whether the classifier satisfies the underlying fairness truth. Our principal conceptual result is an extraction procedure that learns the underlying truth; moreover, the procedure can learn an approximation to this truth given access to a weak form of the oracle. Since every "truly fair" classifier induces a coarse metric, in which those receiving the same decision are at distance zero from one another and those receiving different decisions are at distance one, this extraction process provides the basis for ensuring a rough form of metric fairness, also known as individual fairness.
Our principal technical result is a higher fidelity extractor under a mild technical constraint on the weak oracle’s conception of fairness. Our framework permits the scenario in which many classifiers, with differing outcomes, may all be considered fair.
Our results have implications for interpretablity - a highly desired but poorly defined property of classification systems that endeavors to permit a human arbiter to reject classifiers deemed to be "unfair" or illegitimately derived.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Machine learning theory
Keywords
  • Algorithmic fairness
  • fairness definitions
  • causality-based fairness
  • interpretability
  • individual fairness
  • metric fairness

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