What is Proxy Discrimination?
This work addresses a conceptual problem for researchers and policymakers in fairness and ethics, but it is incremental as it synthesizes prior definitions rather than introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the lack of consensus on defining proxy discrimination by surveying and comparing existing notions in a unified framework, focusing on statistical, causal, and intentional aspects, without presenting new experimental results or numerical findings.
The near universal condemnation of proxy discrimination hides a disagreement over what it is. This work surveys various notions of proxy and proxy discrimination found in prior work and represents them in a common framework. These notions variously turn on statistical dependencies, causal effects, and intentions. It discusses the limitations and uses of each notation and of the concept as a whole.