AISTATS 2020poster30 citations

Auditing ML Models for Individual Bias and Unfairness

Songkai Xue, Mikhail Yurochkin, Yuekai Sun

Abstract

We consider the task of auditing ML models for individual bias/unfairness. We formalize the task in an optimization problem and develop a suite of inferential tools for the optimal value. Our tools permit us to obtain asymptotic confidence intervals and hypothesis tests that cover the target/control the Type I error rate exactly. To demonstrate the utility of our tools, we use them to reveal the gender and racial biases in Northpointe’s COMPAS recidivism prediction instrument.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v108-xue20a,
  title = 	 {Auditing ML Models for Individual Bias and Unfairness},
  author =       {Xue, Songkai and Yurochkin, Mikhail and Sun, Yuekai},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = 	 {4552--4562},
  year = 	 {2020},
  editor = 	 {Chiappa, Silvia and Calandra, Roberto},
  volume = 	 {108},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {26--28 Aug},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v108/xue20a/xue20a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v108/xue20a.html},
  abstract = 	 {We consider the task of auditing ML models for individual bias/unfairness. We formalize the task in an optimization problem and develop a suite of inferential tools for the optimal value. Our tools permit us to obtain asymptotic confidence intervals and hypothesis tests that cover the target/control the Type I error rate exactly. To demonstrate the utility of our tools, we use them to reveal the gender and racial biases in Northpointe’s COMPAS recidivism prediction instrument.}
}
Auditing ML Models for Individual Bias and Unfairness · AISTATS 2020