Bridging Fairness Gaps: A (Conditional) Distance Covariance Perspective in Fairness Learning

Abstract: We bridge fairness gaps from a statistical perspective by selectively utilizing either conditional distance covariance or distance covariance statistics as measures to assess the independence between predictions and sensitive attributes. We enhance fairness by incorporating sample (conditional) distance covariance as a manageable penalty term into the machine learning process. Additionally, we present the matrix form of empirical (conditional) distance covariance for parallel calculations to enhance computational efficiency. Theoretically, we provide a proof for the convergence between empirical and population (conditional) distance covariance, establishing necessary guarantees for batch computations. Through experiments conducted on a range of real-world datasets, we have demonstrated that our method effectively bridges the fairness gap in machine learning.