It is important to guarantee that machine learning algorithms deployed in the real world do not result in unfairness or unintended social consequences. Fair ML has largely focused on the protection of single attributes in the simpler setting where both attributes and target outcomes are binary. However, the practical application in many a real-world problem entails the simultaneous protection of multiple sensitive attributes, which are often not simply binary, but continuous or categorical. To address this more challenging task, we introduce FairCOCCO, a fairness measure built on cross-covariance operators on reproducing kernel Hilbert Spaces. This leads to two practical tools: first, the FairCOCCO Score, a normalised metric that can quantify fairness in settings with single or multiple sensitive attributes of arbitrary type; and second, a subsequent regularisation term that can be incorporated into arbitrary learning objectives to obtain fair predictors. These contributions address crucial gaps in the algorithmic fairness literature, and we empirically demonstrate consistent improvements against state-of-the-art techniques in balancing predictive power and fairness on real-world datasets.

分类，一种重大研究的数据驱动机器学习任务，驱动越来越多的预测系统，涉及批准的人类决策，如贷款批准和犯罪风险评估。然而，分类器经常展示歧视性行为，特别是当呈现有偏置数据时。因此，分类公平已经成为一个高优先级的研究区。数据管理研究显示与数据和算法公平有关的主题的增加和兴趣，包括公平分类的主题。公平分类的跨学科努力，具有最大存在的机器学习研究，导致大量的公平概念和尚未系统地评估和比较的广泛方法。在本文中，我们对13个公平分类方法和额外变种的广泛分析，超越，公平，公平，效率，可扩展性，对数据误差的鲁棒性，对潜在的ML模型，数据效率和使用各种指标的稳定性的敏感性和稳定性现实世界数据集。我们的分析突出了对不同指标的影响的新颖见解和高级方法特征对不同方面的性能方面。我们还讨论了选择适合不同实际设置的方法的一般原则，并确定以数据管理为中心的解决方案可能产生最大影响的区域。

尽管算法公平最近取得了进步，但通过广义线性模型（GLM）实现公平性的方法论，尽管GLM在实践中广泛使用，但尚待探索。在本文中，我们基于预期的结果或对数类似物的均衡介绍了两个公平标准。我们证明，对于GLMS，这两个标准都可以通过基于GLM的线性组件的凸惩罚项来实现，从而允许有效优化。我们还得出了由此产生的公平GLM估计器的理论特性。为了从经验上证明所提出的公平GLM的功效，我们将其与其他众所周知的公平预测方法进行了比较，以用于二进制分类和回归的广泛基准数据集。此外，我们证明了公平的GLM可以为二进制和连续结果以外的一系列响应变量产生公平的预测。

尽管大规模的经验风险最小化（ERM）在各种机器学习任务中取得了高精度，但公平的ERM受到公平限制与随机优化的不兼容的阻碍。我们考虑具有离散敏感属性以及可能需要随机求解器的可能性大型模型和数据集的公平分类问题。现有的内部处理公平算法在大规模设置中要么是不切实际的，因为它们需要在每次迭代时进行大量数据，要么不保证它们会收敛。在本文中，我们开发了第一个具有保证收敛性的随机内处理公平算法。对于人口统计学，均衡的赔率和公平的机会均等的概念，我们提供了算法的略有变化，称为Fermi，并证明这些变化中的每一个都以任何批次大小收敛于随机优化。从经验上讲，我们表明Fermi适合具有多个（非二进制）敏感属性和非二进制目标的随机求解器，即使Minibatch大小也很小，也可以很好地表现。广泛的实验表明，与最先进的基准相比，FERMI实现了所有经过测试的设置之间的公平违规和测试准确性之间最有利的权衡，该基准是人口统计学奇偶校验，均衡的赔率，均等机会，均等机会。这些好处在小批量的大小和非二元分类具有大量敏感属性的情况下尤其重要，这使得费米成为大规模问题的实用公平算法。

公平性是确保机器学习（ML）预测系统不会歧视特定个人或整个子人群（尤其是少数族裔）的重要要求。鉴于观察公平概念的固有主观性，文献中已经引入了几种公平概念。本文是一项调查，说明了通过大量示例和场景之间的公平概念之间的微妙之处。此外，与文献中的其他调查不同，它解决了以下问题：哪种公平概念最适合给定的现实世界情景，为什么？我们试图回答这个问题的尝试包括（1）确定手头现实世界情景的一组与公平相关的特征，（2）分析每个公平概念的行为，然后（3）适合这两个元素以推荐每个特定设置中最合适的公平概念。结果总结在决策图中可以由从业者和政策制定者使用，以导航相对较大的ML目录。

At the core of insurance business lies classification between risky and non-risky insureds, actuarial fairness meaning that risky insureds should contribute more and pay a higher premium than non-risky or less-risky ones. Actuaries, therefore, use econometric or machine learning techniques to classify, but the distinction between a fair actuarial classification and "discrimination" is subtle. For this reason, there is a growing interest about fairness and discrimination in the actuarial community Lindholm, Richman, Tsanakas, and Wuthrich (2022). Presumably, non-sensitive characteristics can serve as substitutes or proxies for protected attributes. For example, the color and model of a car, combined with the driver's occupation, may lead to an undesirable gender bias in the prediction of car insurance prices. Surprisingly, we will show that debiasing the predictor alone may be insufficient to maintain adequate accuracy (1). Indeed, the traditional pricing model is currently built in a two-stage structure that considers many potentially biased components such as car or geographic risks. We will show that this traditional structure has significant limitations in achieving fairness. For this reason, we have developed a novel pricing model approach. Recently some approaches have Blier-Wong, Cossette, Lamontagne, and Marceau (2021); Wuthrich and Merz (2021) shown the value of autoencoders in pricing. In this paper, we will show that (2) this can be generalized to multiple pricing factors (geographic, car type), (3) it perfectly adapted for a fairness context (since it allows to debias the set of pricing components): We extend this main idea to a general framework in which a single whole pricing model is trained by generating the geographic and car pricing components needed to predict the pure premium while mitigating the unwanted bias according to the desired metric.

作为一种预测模型的评分系统具有可解释性和透明度的显着优势，并有助于快速决策。因此，评分系统已广泛用于各种行业，如医疗保健和刑事司法。然而，这些模型中的公平问题长期以来一直受到批评，并且使用大数据和机器学习算法在评分系统的构建中提高了这个问题。在本文中，我们提出了一般框架来创建公平知识，数据驱动评分系统。首先，我们开发一个社会福利功能，融入了效率和群体公平。然后，我们将社会福利最大化问题转换为机器学习中的风险最小化任务，并在混合整数编程的帮助下导出了公平感知评分系统。最后，导出了几种理论界限用于提供参数选择建议。我们拟议的框架提供了适当的解决方案，以解决进程中的分组公平问题。它使政策制定者能够设置和定制其所需的公平要求以及其他特定于应用程序的约束。我们用几个经验数据集测试所提出的算法。实验证据支持拟议的评分制度在实现利益攸关方的最佳福利以及平衡可解释性，公平性和效率的需求方面的有效性。

基于AI和机器学习的决策系统已在各种现实世界中都使用，包括医疗保健，执法，教育和金融。不再是牵强的，即设想一个未来，自治系统将推动整个业务决策，并且更广泛地支持大规模决策基础设施以解决社会最具挑战性的问题。当人类做出决定时，不公平和歧视的问题普遍存在，并且当使用几乎没有透明度，问责制和公平性的机器做出决定时（或可能会放大）。在本文中，我们介绍了\ textit {Causal公平分析}的框架，目的是填补此差距，即理解，建模，并可能解决决策设置中的公平性问题。我们方法的主要见解是将观察到数据中存在的差异的量化与基本且通常是未观察到的因果机制收集的因果机制的收集，这些机制首先会产生差异，挑战我们称之为因果公平的基本问题分析（FPCFA）。为了解决FPCFA，我们研究了分解差异和公平性的经验度量的问题，将这种变化归因于结构机制和人群的不同单位。我们的努力最终达到了公平地图，这是组织和解释文献中不同标准之间关系的首次系统尝试。最后，我们研究了进行因果公平分析并提出一本公平食谱的最低因果假设，该假设使数据科学家能够评估不同影响和不同治疗的存在。

自几十年前以来，已经证明了机器学习评估贷款申请人信誉的实用性。但是，自动决策可能会导致对群体或个人的不同治疗方法，可能导致歧视。本文基准了12种最大的偏见缓解方法，讨论其绩效，该绩效基于5个不同的公平指标，获得的准确性以及为金融机构提供的潜在利润。我们的发现表明，在确保准确性和利润的同时，实现公平性方面的困难。此外，它突出了一些表现最好和最差的人，并有助于弥合实验机学习及其工业应用之间的差距。

近年来，解决机器学习公平性（ML）和自动决策的问题引起了处理人工智能的科学社区的大量关注。已经提出了ML中的公平定义的一种不同的定义，认为不同概念是影响人口中个人的“公平决定”的不同概念。这些概念之间的精确差异，含义和“正交性”尚未在文献中完全分析。在这项工作中，我们试图在这个解释中汲取一些订单。

算法决策的兴起催生了许多关于公平机器学习（ML）的研究。金融机构使用ML来建立支持一系列与信贷有关的决定的风险记分卡。然而，关于信用评分的公平ML的文献很少。该论文做出了三项贡献。首先，我们重新审视统计公平标准，并检查其对信用评分的适当性。其次，我们对将公平目标纳入ML模型开发管道中的算法选项进行了分类。最后，我们从经验上比较了使用现实世界数据以利润为导向的信用评分上下文中的不同公平处理器。经验结果证实了对公平措施的评估，确定了实施公平信用评分的合适选择，并阐明了贷款决策中的利润权衡。我们发现，可以立即达到多个公平标准，并建议分离作为衡量记分卡的公平性的适当标准。我们还发现公平的过程中，可以在利润和公平之间实现良好的平衡，并表明算法歧视可以以相对较低的成本降低到合理的水平。与该论文相对应的代码可在GitHub上获得。

解决公平问题对于安全使用机器学习算法来支持对人们的生活产生关键影响的决策，例如雇用工作，儿童虐待，疾病诊断，贷款授予等。过去十年，例如统计奇偶校验和均衡的赔率。然而，最新的公平概念是基于因果关系的，反映了现在广泛接受的想法，即使用因果关系对于适当解决公平问题是必要的。本文研究了基于因果关系的公平概念的详尽清单，并研究了其在现实情况下的适用性。由于大多数基于因果关系的公平概念都是根据不可观察的数量（例如干预措施和反事实）来定义的，因此它们在实践中的部署需要使用观察数据来计算或估计这些数量。本文提供了有关从观察数据（包括可识别性（Pearl的SCM框架））和估计（潜在结果框架）中推断出因果量的不同方法的全面报告。该调查论文的主要贡献是（1）指南，旨在在特定的现实情况下帮助选择合适的公平概念，以及（2）根据Pearl的因果关系阶梯的公平概念的排名，表明它很难部署。实践中的每个概念。

In past work on fairness in machine learning, the focus has been on forcing the prediction of classifiers to have similar statistical properties for people of different demographics. To reduce the violation of these properties, fairness methods usually simply rescale the classifier scores, ignoring similarities and dissimilarities between members of different groups. Yet, we hypothesize that such information is relevant in quantifying the unfairness of a given classifier. To validate this hypothesis, we introduce Optimal Transport to Fairness (OTF), a method that quantifies the violation of fairness constraints as the smallest Optimal Transport cost between a probabilistic classifier and any score function that satisfies these constraints. For a flexible class of linear fairness constraints, we construct a practical way to compute OTF as a differentiable fairness regularizer that can be added to any standard classification setting. Experiments show that OTF can be used to achieve an improved trade-off between predictive power and fairness.

It is of critical importance to be aware of the historical discrimination embedded in the data and to consider a fairness measure to reduce bias throughout the predictive modeling pipeline. Given various notions of fairness defined in the literature, investigating the correlation and interaction among metrics is vital for addressing unfairness. Practitioners and data scientists should be able to comprehend each metric and examine their impact on one another given the context, use case, and regulations. Exploring the combinatorial space of different metrics for such examination is burdensome. To alleviate the burden of selecting fairness notions for consideration, we propose a framework that estimates the correlation among fairness notions. Our framework consequently identifies a set of diverse and semantically distinct metrics as representative for a given context. We propose a Monte-Carlo sampling technique for computing the correlations between fairness metrics by indirect and efficient perturbation in the model space. Using the estimated correlations, we then find a subset of representative metrics. The paper proposes a generic method that can be generalized to any arbitrary set of fairness metrics. We showcase the validity of the proposal using comprehensive experiments on real-world benchmark datasets.

We introduce the Conditional Independence Regression CovariancE (CIRCE), a measure of conditional independence for multivariate continuous-valued variables. CIRCE applies as a regularizer in settings where we wish to learn neural features $\varphi(X)$ of data $X$ to estimate a target $Y$, while being conditionally independent of a distractor $Z$ given $Y$. Both $Z$ and $Y$ are assumed to be continuous-valued but relatively low dimensional, whereas $X$ and its features may be complex and high dimensional. Relevant settings include domain-invariant learning, fairness, and causal learning. The procedure requires just a single ridge regression from $Y$ to kernelized features of $Z$, which can be done in advance. It is then only necessary to enforce independence of $\varphi(X)$ from residuals of this regression, which is possible with attractive estimation properties and consistency guarantees. By contrast, earlier measures of conditional feature dependence require multiple regressions for each step of feature learning, resulting in more severe bias and variance, and greater computational cost. When sufficiently rich features are used, we establish that CIRCE is zero if and only if $\varphi(X) \perp \!\!\! \perp Z \mid Y$. In experiments, we show superior performance to previous methods on challenging benchmarks, including learning conditionally invariant image features.

由于决策越来越依赖机器学习和（大）数据，数据驱动AI系统的公平问题正在接受研究和行业的增加。已经提出了各种公平知识的机器学习解决方案，该解决方案提出了数据，学习算法和/或模型输出中的公平相关的干预措施。然而，提出新方法的重要组成部分正在经验上对其进行验证在代表现实和不同的设置的基准数据集上。因此，在本文中，我们概述了用于公平知识机器学习的真实数据集。我们专注于表格数据作为公平感知机器学习的最常见的数据表示。我们通过识别不同属性之间的关系，特别是w.r.t.来开始分析。受保护的属性和类属性，使用贝叶斯网络。为了更深入地了解数据集中的偏见和公平性，我们调查使用探索性分析的有趣关系。

我们提出了一种学习在某些协变量反事实变化下不变的预测因子的方法。当预测目标受到不应影响预测因子输出的协变量影响时，此方法很有用。例如，对象识别模型可能会受到对象本身的位置，方向或比例的影响。我们解决了训练预测因素的问题，这些预测因素明确反对反对这种协变量的变化。我们提出了一个基于条件内核均值嵌入的模型不合稳定项，以在训练过程中实现反事实的不变性。我们证明了我们的方法的健全性，可以处理混合的分类和连续多变量属性。关于合成和现实世界数据的经验结果证明了我们方法在各种环境中的功效。

机器学习模型在高赌注应用中变得普遍存在。尽管在绩效方面有明显的效益，但该模型可以表现出对少数民族群体的偏见，并导致决策过程中的公平问题，导致对个人和社会的严重负面影响。近年来，已经开发了各种技术来减轻机器学习模型的偏差。其中，加工方法已经增加了社区的关注，在模型设计期间直接考虑公平，以诱导本质上公平的模型，从根本上减轻了产出和陈述中的公平问题。在本调查中，我们审查了加工偏置减缓技术的当前进展。基于在模型中实现公平的地方，我们将它们分类为明确和隐性的方法，前者直接在培训目标中纳入公平度量，后者重点介绍精炼潜在代表学习。最后，我们在讨论该社区中的研究挑战来讨论调查，以激励未来的探索。

What does it mean for an algorithm to be biased? In U.S. law, unintentional bias is encoded via disparate impact, which occurs when a selection process has widely different outcomes for different groups, even as it appears to be neutral. This legal determination hinges on a definition of a protected class (ethnicity, gender) and an explicit description of the process.When computers are involved, determining disparate impact (and hence bias) is harder. It might not be possible to disclose the process. In addition, even if the process is open, it might be hard to elucidate in a legal setting how the algorithm makes its decisions. Instead of requiring access to the process, we propose making inferences based on the data it uses.We present four contributions. First, we link disparate impact to a measure of classification accuracy that while known, has received relatively little attention. Second, we propose a test for disparate impact based on how well the protected class can be predicted from the other attributes. Third, we describe methods by which data might be made unbiased. Finally, we present empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of our test for disparate impact and our approach for both masking bias and preserving relevant information in the data. Interestingly, our approach resembles some actual selection practices that have recently received legal scrutiny.

Machine learning can impact people with legal or ethical consequences when it is used to automate decisions in areas such as insurance, lending, hiring, and predictive policing. In many of these scenarios, previous decisions have been made that are unfairly biased against certain subpopulations, for example those of a particular race, gender, or sexual orientation. Since this past data may be biased, machine learning predictors must account for this to avoid perpetuating or creating discriminatory practices. In this paper, we develop a framework for modeling fairness using tools from causal inference. Our definition of counterfactual fairness captures the intuition that a decision is fair towards an individual if it is the same in (a) the actual world and (b) a counterfactual world where the individual belonged to a different demographic group. We demonstrate our framework on a real-world problem of fair prediction of success in law school. * Equal contribution. This work was done while JL was a Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. 2 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/05/04/big-risks-big-opportunities-intersection-big-dataand-civil-rights 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017),