Can Ensembling Pre-processing Algorithms Lead to Better Machine Learning Fairness?
This work addresses fairness in ML systems for practitioners, but it is incremental as it focuses on combining existing algorithms without introducing a new method.
The paper tackled the problem of conflicting fairness strategies and trade-offs in machine learning by evaluating three popular fairness pre-processing algorithms and investigating their combination into an ensemble, reporting lessons learned to aid practitioners in algorithm selection.
As machine learning (ML) systems get adopted in more critical areas, it has become increasingly crucial to address the bias that could occur in these systems. Several fairness pre-processing algorithms are available to alleviate implicit biases during model training. These algorithms employ different concepts of fairness, often leading to conflicting strategies with consequential trade-offs between fairness and accuracy. In this work, we evaluate three popular fairness pre-processing algorithms and investigate the potential for combining all algorithms into a more robust pre-processing ensemble. We report on lessons learned that can help practitioners better select fairness algorithms for their models.