论文标题
因果公平分析
Causal Fairness Analysis
论文作者
论文摘要
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。设想一个自主系统将推动整个业务决策的未来不再牵强,更广泛地支持大规模的决策基础设施来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的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差异联系起来,这些因果机制首先会产生差异,挑战我们称为因果公平分析的基本问题(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存在不同影响和不同治疗方法的存在。
Decision-making systems based on AI and machine learning have been used throughout a wide range of real-world scenarios, including healthcare, law enforcement, education, and finance. It is no longer far-fetched to envision a future where autonomous systems will be driving entire business decisions and, more broadly, supporting large-scale decision-making infrastructure to solve society's most challenging problems. Issues of unfairness and discrimination are pervasive when decisions are being made by humans, and remain (or are potentially amplified) when decisions are made using machines with little transparency, accountability, and fairness. In this paper, we introduce a framework for \textit{causal fairness analysis} with the intent of filling in this gap, i.e., understanding, modeling, and possibly solving issues of fairness in decision-making settings. The main insight of our approach will be to link the quantification of the disparities present on the observed data with the underlying, and often unobserved, collection of causal mechanisms that generate the disparity in the first place, challenge we call the Fundamental Problem of Causal Fairness Analysis (FPCFA). In order to solve the FPCFA, we study the problem of decomposing variations and empirical measures of fairness that attribute such variations to structural mechanisms and different units of the population. Our effort culminates in the Fairness Map, which is the first systematic attempt to organize and explain the relationship between different criteria found in the literature. Finally, we study which causal assumptions are minimally needed for performing causal fairness analysis and propose a Fairness Cookbook, which allows data scientists to assess the existence of disparate impact and disparate treatment.