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A Ranking Approach to Fair Classification

Schöffer, Jakob ORCID iD icon; Kühl, Niklas ORCID iD icon; Valera, Isabel

Abstract:

Algorithmic decision systems are increasingly used in areas such as hiring, school admission, or loan approval. Typically, these systems rely on labeled data for training a classification model. However, in many scenarios, ground-truth labels are unavailable, and instead we have only access to imperfect labels as the result of (potentially biased) human-made decisions. Despite being imperfect, historical decisions often contain some useful information on the unobserved true labels. In this paper, we focus on scenarios where only imperfect labels are available and propose a new fair ranking-based decision system, as an alternative to traditional classification algorithms. Our approach is both intuitive and easy to implement, and thus particularly suitable for adoption in real-world settings. More in detail, we introduce a distance-based decision criterion, which incorporates useful information from historical decisions and accounts for unwanted correlation between protected and legitimate features. Through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we show that our method is fair, as it a) assigns the desirable outcome to the most qualified individuals, and b) removes the effect of stereotypes in decision-making, thereby outperforming traditional classification algorithms. ... mehr


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Originalveröffentlichung
DOI: 10.1145/3460112.3471950
Scopus
Zitationen: 6
Dimensions
Zitationen: 6
Zugehörige Institution(en) am KIT Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik und Marketing (IISM)
Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI)
Publikationstyp Proceedingsbeitrag
Publikationsjahr 2021
Sprache Englisch
Identifikator KITopen-ID: 1000130550
Erschienen in COMPASS '21: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, June 28 - July 2, 2021, Virtual Event, Australia
Veranstaltung 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS 2021), Online, 28.06.2021 – 02.07.2021
Verlag Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Seiten 115-125
Externe Relationen Konferenz
Nachgewiesen in Dimensions
arXiv
Scopus
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