Counterpart Fairness -- Addressing Systematic between-group Differences in Fairness Evaluation

Abstract: When using machine learning to aid decision-making, it is critical to ensure that an algorithmic decision is fair and does not discriminate against specific individuals/groups, particularly those from underprivileged populations. Existing group fairness methods aim to ensure equal outcomes (such as loan approval rates) across groups delineated by protected variables like race or gender. However, in cases where systematic differences between groups play a significant role in outcomes, these methods may overlook the influence of non-protected variables that can systematically vary across groups. These confounding factors can affect fairness evaluations, making it challenging to assess whether disparities are due to discrimination or inherent differences. Therefore, we recommend a more refined and comprehensive fairness index that accounts for both the systematic differences within groups and the multifaceted, intertwined confounding effects. The proposed index evaluates fairness on counterparts (pairs of individuals who are similar with respect to the task of interest but from different groups), whose group identities cannot be distinguished algorithmically by exploring confounding factors. To identify counterparts, we developed a two-step matching method inspired by propensity score and metric learning. In addition, we introduced a counterpart-based statistical fairness index, called Counterpart Fairness (CFair), to assess the fairness of machine learning models. Empirical results on the MIMIC and COMPAS datasets indicate that standard group-based fairness metrics may not adequately inform about the degree of unfairness present in predictions, as revealed through CFair.