Evaluation of group fairness measures in student performance prediction problems
This work addresses fairness issues in educational data mining for students, but it is incremental as it focuses on comparative evaluation rather than introducing new methods.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating group fairness measures in student performance prediction, finding that both the choice of fairness measure and grade threshold significantly impact fairness outcomes.
Predicting students' academic performance is one of the key tasks of educational data mining (EDM). Traditionally, the high forecasting quality of such models was deemed critical. More recently, the issues of fairness and discrimination w.r.t. protected attributes, such as gender or race, have gained attention. Although there are several fairness-aware learning approaches in EDM, a comparative evaluation of these measures is still missing. In this paper, we evaluate different group fairness measures for student performance prediction problems on various educational datasets and fairness-aware learning models. Our study shows that the choice of the fairness measure is important, likewise for the choice of the grade threshold.