Fairness Score and Process Standardization: Framework for Fairness Certification in Artificial Intelligence Systems

Abstract: Decisions made by various AI systems greatly influence our day-to-day lives. With the increasing use of AI systems, it becomes crucial to know that they are fair, identify the underlying biases in their decision-making, and create a standardized framework to ascertain their fairness. In this paper, we propose a novel Fairness Score to measure the fairness of a data-driven AI system and a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for issuing Fairness Certification for such systems. Fairness Score and audit process standardization will ensure quality, reduce ambiguity, enable comparison and improve the trustworthiness of the AI systems. It will also provide a framework to operationalise the concept of fairness and facilitate the commercial deployment of such systems. Furthermore, a Fairness Certificate issued by a designated third-party auditing agency following the standardized process would boost the conviction of the organizations in the AI systems that they intend to deploy. The Bias Index proposed in this paper also reveals comparative bias amongst the various protected attributes within the dataset. To substantiate the proposed framework, we iteratively train a model on biased and unbiased data using multiple datasets and check that the Fairness Score and the proposed process correctly identify the biases and judge the fairness.