Accuracy and Fairness Trade-offs in Machine Learning: A Stochastic Multi-Objective Approach
This addresses fairness issues in critical applications like credit scoring and criminal justice, offering a more comprehensive trade-off analysis, though it is incremental in improving existing fairness methods.
The paper tackles the trade-off between accuracy and fairness in machine learning by formulating a stochastic multi-objective optimization problem to define Pareto fronts, resulting in an efficient method that handles streaming data and provides well-spread trade-off curves.
In the application of machine learning to real-life decision-making systems, e.g., credit scoring and criminal justice, the prediction outcomes might discriminate against people with sensitive attributes, leading to unfairness. The commonly used strategy in fair machine learning is to include fairness as a constraint or a penalization term in the minimization of the prediction loss, which ultimately limits the information given to decision-makers. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to handle fairness by formulating a stochastic multi-objective optimization problem for which the corresponding Pareto fronts uniquely and comprehensively define the accuracy-fairness trade-offs. We have then applied a stochastic approximation-type method to efficiently obtain well-spread and accurate Pareto fronts, and by doing so we can handle training data arriving in a streaming way.