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Oral
A Reductions Approach to Fair Classification
Alekh Agarwal · Alina Beygelzimer · Miroslav Dudik · John Langford · Hanna Wallach

Fri Jul 13 12:30 AM -- 12:50 AM (PDT) @ A6
in Society Impacts of Machine Learning 2 »

We present a systematic approach for achieving fairness in a binary classification setting. While we focus on two well-known quantitative definitions of fairness, our approach encompasses many other previously studied definitions as special cases. The key idea is to reduce fair classification to a sequence of cost-sensitive classification problems, whose solutions yield a randomized classifier with the lowest (empirical) error subject to the desired constraints. We introduce two reductions that work for any representation of the cost-sensitive classifier and compare favorably to prior baselines on a variety of data sets, while overcoming several of their disadvantages.

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Author Information

Alekh Agarwal (Microsoft Research)
Alina Beygelzimer (Yahoo Research)
Miroslav Dudik (Microsoft Research)
Miroslav Dudik

Miroslav Dudík is a Senior Principal Researcher in machine learning at Microsoft Research, NYC. His research focuses on combining theoretical and applied aspects of machine learning, statistics, convex optimization, and algorithms. Most recently he has worked on contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, and algorithmic fairness. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2007. He is a co-creator of the Fairlearn toolkit for assessing and improving the fairness of machine learning models and of the Maxent package for modeling species distributions, which is used by biologists around the world to design national parks, model the impacts of climate change, and discover new species.

John Langford (MSR)
Hanna Wallach (Microsoft Research)

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