Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Too Relaxed to Be Fair

Michael Lohaus · MichaĆ«l Perrot · Ulrike von Luxburg

Virtual

Keywords: [ Fairness, Equity, Justice, and Safety ] [ Fairness, Equity and Justice ] [ Supervised Learning ]


Abstract:

We address the problem of classification under fairness constraints. Given a notion of fairness, the goal is to learn a classifier that is not discriminatory against a group of individuals. In the literature, this problem is often formulated as a constrained optimization problem and solved using relaxations of the fairness constraints. We show that many existing relaxations are unsatisfactory: even if a model satisfies the relaxed constraint, it can be surprisingly unfair. We propose a principled framework to solve this problem. This new approach uses a strongly convex formulation and comes with theoretical guarantees on the fairness of its solution. In practice, we show that this method gives promising results on real data.

Chat is not available.