FairRR: Pre-Processing for Group Fairness through Randomized Response
Xianli Zeng, Joshua Ward, Guang Cheng
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- github.com/ucla-trustworthy-ai-lab/fairrrOfficialIn paperpytorch★ 2
Abstract
The increasing usage of machine learning models in consequential decision-making processes has spurred research into the fairness of these systems. While significant work has been done to study group fairness in the in-processing and post-processing setting, there has been little that theoretically connects these results to the pre-processing domain. This paper proposes that achieving group fairness in downstream models can be formulated as finding the optimal design matrix in which to modify a response variable in a Randomized Response framework. We show that measures of group fairness can be directly controlled for with optimal model utility, proposing a pre-processing algorithm called FairRR that yields excellent downstream model utility and fairness.