A Convex Framework for Fair Regression

By: Richard Berk, Hoda Heidari, Shahin Jabbari, Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Roth

Format:Print
| Language:English

Abstract

We introduce a flexible family of fairness regularizers for (linear and logistic) regression problems. These regularizers all enjoy convexity, permitting fast optimization, and they span the range from notions of group fairness to strong individual fairness. By varying the weight on the fairness regularizer, we can compute the efficient frontier of the accuracy-fairness trade-off on any given dataset, and we measure the severity of this trade-off via a numerical quantity we call the Price of Fairness (PoF). The centerpiece of our results is an extensive comparative study of the PoF across six different datasets in which fairness is a primary consideration.

Keywords

Regression Models; Machine Learning; Fairness; Framework; Mathematical Methods

Citation

Berk, Richard, Hoda Heidari, Shahin Jabbari, Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel, and Aaron Roth. "A Convex Framework for Fair Regression." Paper presented at the 4th Workshop on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning, Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), August 14, 2017.