The paper analyzes the accuracy of publicly available object-recognition systems on a geographically diverse dataset. This dataset contains household items and was designed to have a more representative geographical coverage than commonly used image datasets in object recognition. We find that the systems perform relatively poorly on household items that commonly occur in countries with a low household income. Qualitative analyses suggest the drop in performance is primarily due to appearance differences within an object class (e.g., dish soap) and due to items appearing in a different context (e.g., toothbrushes appearing outside of bathrooms). The results of our study suggest that further work is needed to make object-recognition systems work equally well for people across different countries and income levels.
A range of recent papers have studied how to develop machine-learning systems that behave according to some definition of fairness. Several formulations of fairness exist. For instance, @cite_32 @cite_30 @cite_33 @cite_12 @cite_37 @cite_31 @cite_28 @cite_20 states that in binary-classification settings, members of different groups should have the same chance of receiving a positive prediction. Because statistical parity may be inappropriate when base rates differ between groups, @cite_18 @cite_4 poses that positive-classification rates between any two groups should not vary by more than $80 The empirical study presented here does not neatly fit into many of the existing fairness as it focuses on multi-class (and potentially multi-label) prediction rather than binary prediction. Moreover, the input provided to image-recognition systems does not contain information on the user or its group membership, which makes it difficult to apply fairness formulations based on group membership of similarities between individuals. Having said that, commonly used techniques to increase fairness, such as instance re-weighting @cite_35 , analyzing features @cite_6 may help in training image-recognition systems that work for everyone.
@cite_30 @cite_35 @cite_37 @cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_28 @cite_32 @cite_6 @cite_31 @cite_20 @cite_12
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In this paper, we investigate how to modify the naive Bayes classifier in order to perform classification that is restricted to be independent with respect to a given sensitive attribute. Such independency restrictions occur naturally when the decision process leading to the labels in the data-set was biased; e.g., due to gender or racial discrimination. This setting is motivated by many cases in which there exist laws that disallow a decision that is partly based on discrimination. Naive application of machine learning techniques would result in huge fines for companies. We present three approaches for making the naive Bayes classifier discrimination-free: (i) modifying the probability of the decision being positive, (ii) training one model for every sensitive attribute value and balancing them, and (iii) adding a latent variable to the Bayesian model that represents the unbiased label and optimizing the model parameters for likelihood using expectation maximization. We present experiments for the three approaches on both artificial and real-life data. Datasets often contain biases which unfairly disadvantage certain groups, and classifiers trained on such datasets can inherit these biases. In this paper, we provide a mathematical formulation of how this bias can arise. We do so by assuming the existence of underlying, unknown, and unbiased labels which are overwritten by an agent who intends to provide accurate labels but may have biases against certain groups. Despite the fact that we only observe the biased labels, we are able to show that the bias may nevertheless be corrected by re-weighting the data points without changing the labels. We show, with theoretical guarantees, that training on the re-weighted dataset corresponds to training on the unobserved but unbiased labels, thus leading to an unbiased machine learning classifier. Our procedure is fast and robust and can be used with virtually any learning algorithm. We evaluate on a number of standard machine learning fairness datasets and a variety of fairness notions, finding that our method outperforms standard approaches in achieving fair classification. Classification models usually make predictions on the basis of training data. If the training data is biased towards certain groups or classes of objects, e.g., there is racial discrimination towards black people, the learned model will also show discriminatory behavior towards that particular community. This partial attitude of the learned model may lead to biased outcomes when labeling future unlabeled data objects. Often, however, impartial classification results are desired or even required by law for future data objects in spite of having biased training data. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing a new classification scheme for learning unbiased models on biased training data. Our method is based on massaging the dataset by making the least intrusive modifications which lead to an unbiased dataset. On this modified dataset we then learn a non-discriminating classifier. The proposed method has been implemented and experimental results on a credit approval dataset show promising results: in all experiments our method is able to reduce the prejudicial behavior for future classification significantly without loosing too much predictive accuracy. What does it mean for an algorithm to be biased? In U.S. law, unintentional bias is encoded via disparate impact, which occurs when a selection process has widely different outcomes for different groups, even as it appears to be neutral. This legal determination hinges on a definition of a protected class (ethnicity, gender) and an explicit description of the process. When computers are involved, determining disparate impact (and hence bias) is harder. It might not be possible to disclose the process. In addition, even if the process is open, it might be hard to elucidate in a legal setting how the algorithm makes its decisions. Instead of requiring access to the process, we propose making inferences based on the data it uses. We present four contributions. First, we link disparate impact to a measure of classification accuracy that while known, has received relatively little attention. Second, we propose a test for disparate impact based on how well the protected class can be predicted from the other attributes. Third, we describe methods by which data might be made unbiased. Finally, we present empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of our test for disparate impact and our approach for both masking bias and preserving relevant information in the data. Interestingly, our approach resembles some actual selection practices that have recently received legal scrutiny. Abstract: In practice, there are often constraints on the decisions that may be made for a decision problem, or in communicating data. One example of such a constraint is that a decision must not favour a particular group. Another is that data must not have identifying information. We address these two related issues by learning flexible representations that minimize the capability of an adversarial critic. This adversary is trying to predict the relevant sensitive variable from the representation, and so minimizing the performance of the adversary ensures there is little or no information in the representation about the sensitive variable. We demonstrate this in the specific contexts of making decisions free from discrimination and removing private information from images. Abstract: We investigate the problem of learning representations that are invariant to certain nuisance or sensitive factors of variation in the data while retaining as much of the remaining information as possible. Our model is based on a variational autoencoding architecture with priors that encourage independence between sensitive and latent factors of variation. Any subsequent processing, such as classification, can then be performed on this purged latent representation. To remove any remaining dependencies we incorporate an additional penalty term based on the "Maximum Mean Discrepancy" (MMD) measure. We discuss how these architectures can be efficiently trained on data and show in experiments that this method is more effective than previous work in removing unwanted sources of variation while maintaining informative latent representations. In this paper we study the problem of classifier learning where the input data contains unjustified dependencies between some data attributes and the class label. Such cases arise for example when the training data is collected from different sources with different labeling criteria or when the data is generated by a biased decision process. When a classifier is trained directly on such data, these undesirable dependencies will carry over to the classifier’s predictions. In order to tackle this problem, we study the classification with independency constraints problem: find an accurate model for which the predictions are independent from a given binary attribute. We propose two solutions for this problem and present an empirical validation. Data-trained predictive models see widespread use, but for the most part they are used as black boxes which output a prediction or score. It is therefore hard to acquire a deeper understanding of model behavior, and in particular how different features influence the model prediction. This is important when interpreting the behavior of complex models, or asserting that certain problematic attributes (like race or gender) are not unduly influencing decisions. In this paper, we present a technique for auditing black-box models, which lets us study the extent to which existing models take advantage of particular features in the dataset, without knowing how the models work. Our work focuses on the problem of indirect influence: how some features might indirectly influence outcomes via other, related features. As a result, we can find attribute influences even in cases where, upon further direct examination of the model, the attribute is not referred to by the model at all. Our approach does not require the black-box model to be retrained. This is important if (for example) the model is only accessible via an API, and contrasts our work with other methods that investigate feature influence like feature selection. We present experimental evidence for the effectiveness of our procedure using a variety of publicly available datasets and models. We also validate our procedure using techniques from interpretable learning and feature selection, as well as against other black-box auditing procedures. With the spread of data mining technologies and the accumulation of social data, such technologies and data are being used for determinations that seriously affect people's lives. For example, credit scoring is frequently determined based on the records of past credit data together with statistical prediction techniques. Needless to say, such determinations must be socially and legally fair from a viewpoint of social responsibility, namely, it must be unbiased and nondiscriminatory in sensitive features, such as race, gender, religion, and so on. Several researchers have recently begun to attempt the development of analysis techniques that are aware of social fairness or discrimination. They have shown that simply avoiding the use of sensitive features is insufficient for eliminating biases in determinations, due to the indirect influence of sensitive information. From a privacy-preserving viewpoint, this can be interpreted as hiding sensitive information when classification results are observed. In this paper, we first discuss three causes of unfairness in machine learning. We then propose a regularization approach that is applicable to any prediction algorithm with probabilistic discriminative models. We further apply this approach to logistic regression and empirically show its effectiveness and efficiency. Automated data-driven decision systems are ubiquitous across a wide variety of online services, from online social networking and e-commerce to e-government. These systems rely on complex learning methods and vast amounts of data to optimize the service functionality, satisfaction of the end user and profitability. However, there is a growing concern that these automated decisions can lead to user discrimination, even in the absence of intent, leading to a lack of fairness, i.e., their outcomes have a disproportionally large adverse impact on particular groups of people sharing one or more sensitive attributes (e.g., race, sex). In this paper, we introduce a flexible mechanism to design fair classifiers in a principled manner. Then, we instantiate this mechanism on three well-known classifiers -- logistic regression, hinge loss and linear and nonlinear support vector machines. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our mechanism allows for a fine-grained control of the level of fairness, often at a minimal cost in terms of accuracy, and it provides more flexibility than alternatives.