Fairness Measures for Regression via Probabilistic Classification

Abstract: Algorithmic fairness involves expressing notions such as equity, or reasonable treatment, as quantifiable measures that a machine learning algorithm can optimise. Most work in the literature to date has focused on classification problems where the prediction is categorical, such as accepting or rejecting a loan application. This is in part because classification fairness measures are easily computed by comparing the rates of outcomes, leading to behaviours such as ensuring that the same fraction of eligible men are selected as eligible women. But such measures are computationally difficult to generalise to the continuous regression setting for problems such as pricing, or allocating payments. The difficulty arises from estimating conditional densities (such as the probability density that a system will over-charge by a certain amount). For the regression setting we introduce tractable approximations of the independence, separation and sufficiency criteria by observing that they factorise as ratios of different conditional probabilities of the protected attributes. We introduce and train machine learning classifiers, distinct from the predictor, as a mechanism to estimate these probabilities from the data. This naturally leads to model agnostic, tractable approximations of the criteria, which we explore experimentally.