Reducing Biases in Record Matching Through Scores Calibration (2411.01685v2)

Abstract: Record matching is the task of identifying records that refer to the same real-world entity across datasets. While most existing models optimize for accuracy, fairness has become an important concern due to the potential for unequal outcomes across demographic groups. Prior work typically focuses on binary outcomes evaluated at fixed decision thresholds. However, such evaluations can miss biases in matching scores--biases that persist across thresholds and affect downstream tasks. We propose a threshold-independent framework for measuring and reducing score bias, defined as disparities in the distribution of matching scores across groups. We show that several state-of-the-art matching methods exhibit substantial score bias, even when appearing fair under standard threshold-based metrics. To address this, we introduce two post-processing score calibration algorithms. The first, calib, aligns group-wise score distributions using the Wasserstein barycenter, targeting demographic parity. The second, ccalib, conditions on predicted labels to further reduce label-dependent biases, such as equal opportunity. Both methods are model-agnostic and require no access to model training data. calib also offers theoretical guarantees, ensuring reduced bias with minimal deviation from original scores. Experiments across real-world datasets and matching models confirm that calib and ccalib substantially reduce score bias while minimally impacting model accuracy.