Rawlsian Fairness for Machine Learning

By: Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

Format:Video
| Language:English

Abstract

Motivated by concerns that automated decision-making procedures can unintentionally lead to discriminatory behavior, we study a technical definition of fairness modeled after John Rawls' notion of "fair equality of opportunity". In the context of a simple model of online decision making, we give an algorithm that satisfies this fairness constraint, while still being able to learn at a rate that is comparable to (but necessarily worse than) that of the best algorithms absent a fairness constraint. We prove a regret bound for fair algorithms in the linear contextual bandit framework that is a significant improvement over our technical companion paper [16], which gives black-box reductions in a more general setting. We analyze our algorithms both theoretically and experimentally. Finally, we introduce the notion of a "discrimination index", and show that standard algorithms for our problem exhibit structured discriminatory behavior, whereas the "fair" algorithms we develop do not.

Keywords

Machine Learning; Algorithms; Fairness; Decision Making; Mathematical Methods

Citation

Joseph, Matthew, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel, and Aaron Leon Roth. "Rawlsian Fairness for Machine Learning." Paper presented at the 3rd Workshop on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning, Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), November 18, 2016.