Characterizing Fairness Over the Set of Good Models Under Selective Labels

By Amanda Coston, Ashesh Rambachan, Alexandra Chouldechova. 2021

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Algorithmic risk assessments are used to inform decisions in a wide variety of high-stakes settings. Often multiple predictive models deliver similar overall performance but differ markedly in their predictions for individual cases, an empirical phenomenon known as the"Rashomon Effect."These models may have different properties over various groups, and therefore have different predictive fairness properties. We develop a framework for characterizing predictive fairness properties over the set of models that deliver similar overall performance, or"the set of good models."Our framework addresses the empirically relevant challenge of selectively labelled data in the setting where the selection decision and outcome are unconfounded given the observed data features. Our framework can be used to 1) replace an existing model with one that has better fairness properties; or 2) audit for predictive bias. We illustrate these uses cases on a real-world credit-scoring task and a recidivism prediction task.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Safety Research, Evaluation & Benchmarks, AI Ethics, Fairness & Society

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Citations in the corpus

Interpretable Machine Learning: Fundamental Principles and 10 Grand Challenges (2021, background): “Models with various important properties besides interpretability can exist in the Rashomon set, including fairness (Coston et al., 2021) and monotonicity.”