Journal
Publisher
ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY
DOI: 10.1145/3468264.3468537
Keywords
Software Fairness; Fairness Metrics; Bias Mitigation
Categories
Funding
- NSF [1908762]
- LAS
- Division of Computing and Communication Foundations
- Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr [1908762] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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This study addresses bias in software decisions and proposes a new solution. By eliminating biased labels and rebalancing internal distributions, it reduces bias while increasing performance and maintaining fairness.
Increasingly, software is making autonomous decisions in case of criminal sentencing, approving credit cards, hiring employees, and so on. Some of these decisions show bias and adversely affect certain social groups (e.g. those defined by sex, race, age, marital status). Many prior works on bias mitigation take the following form: change the data or learners in multiple ways, then see if any of that improves fairness. Perhaps a better approach is to postulate root causes of bias and then applying some resolution strategy. This paper checks if the root causes of bias are the prior decisions about (a) what data was selected and (b) the labels assigned to those examples. Our Fair-SMOTE algorithm removes biased labels; and rebalances internal distributions so that, based on sensitive attribute, examples are equal in positive and negative classes. On testing, this method was just as effective at reducing bias as prior approaches. Further, models generated via Fair-SMOTE achieve higher performance (measured in terms of recall and F1) than other state-of-the-art fairness improvement algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, measured in terms of number of analyzed learners and datasets, this study is one of the largest studies on bias mitigation yet presented in the literature.
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