Fair Bilevel Neural Network (FairBiNN): On Balancing fairness and accuracy via Stackelberg Equilibrium
This addresses bias mitigation in ML models for applications like tabular data classification, offering a more balanced solution, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing bilevel optimization principles.
The paper tackles the challenge of balancing fairness and accuracy in machine learning classification tasks by proposing a bilevel optimization method, demonstrating superior performance on datasets like UCI Adult and Heritage Health compared to state-of-the-art fairness methods.
The persistent challenge of bias in machine learning models necessitates robust solutions to ensure parity and equal treatment across diverse groups, particularly in classification tasks. Current methods for mitigating bias often result in information loss and an inadequate balance between accuracy and fairness. To address this, we propose a novel methodology grounded in bilevel optimization principles. Our deep learning-based approach concurrently optimizes for both accuracy and fairness objectives, and under certain assumptions, achieving proven Pareto optimal solutions while mitigating bias in the trained model. Theoretical analysis indicates that the upper bound on the loss incurred by this method is less than or equal to the loss of the Lagrangian approach, which involves adding a regularization term to the loss function. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model primarily on tabular datasets such as UCI Adult and Heritage Health. When benchmarked against state-of-the-art fairness methods, our model exhibits superior performance, advancing fairness-aware machine learning solutions and bridging the accuracy-fairness gap. The implementation of FairBiNN is available on https://github.com/yazdanimehdi/FairBiNN.