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conference paper

Classification with Fairness Constraints: A Meta-Algorithm with Provable Guarantees

Celis, L. Elisa
•
Huang, Lingxiao  
•
Keswani, Vijay  
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January 1, 2019
Fat*'19: Proceedings Of The 2019 Conference On Fairness, Accountability, And Transparency
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT)

Developing classification algorithms that are fair with respect to sensitive attributes of the data is an important problem due to the increased deployment of classification algorithms in societal contexts. Several recent works have focused on studying classification with respect to specific fairness metrics, modeled the corresponding fair classification problem as constrained optimization problems, and developed tailored algorithms to solve them. Despite this, there still remain important metrics for which there are no fair classifiers with theoretical guarantees; primarily because the resulting optimization problem is non-convex. The main contribution of this paper is a meta-algorithm for classification that can take as input a general class of fairness constraints with respect to multiple non disjoint and multi-valued sensitive attributes, and which comes with provable guarantees. In particular, our algorithm can handle non-convex "linear fractional" constraints (which includes fairness constraints such as predictive parity) for which no prior algorithm was known. Key to our results is an algorithm for a family of classification problems with convex constraints along with a reduction from classification problems with linear fractional constraints to this family. Empirically, we observe that our algorithm is fast, can achieve near-perfect fairness with respect to various fairness metrics, and the loss in accuracy due to the imposed fairness constraints is often small.

  • Details
  • Metrics
Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3287560.3287586
Web of Science ID

WOS:000473814700034

Author(s)
Celis, L. Elisa
Huang, Lingxiao  
Keswani, Vijay  
Vishnoi, Nisheeth K.  
Date Issued

2019-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Publisher place

New York

Published in
Fat*'19: Proceedings Of The 2019 Conference On Fairness, Accountability, And Transparency
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-6125-5

Start page

319

End page

328

Subjects

classification

•

algorithmic fairness

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LTHC  
THL3  
INDY2  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT)

Atlanta, GA

Jan 29-31, 2019

Available on Infoscience
July 17, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/159165
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