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Contributed talks 6: Group Fairness by Probabilistic Modeling with Latent Fair Decisions
YooJung Choi · Guy Van den Broeck

Sat Dec 12 09:00 AM -- 09:10 AM (PST) @
in Algorithmic Fairness through the Lens of Causality and Interpretability »
Event URL: https://neurips.gather.town/app/SaW73Rp8mVWAKH8L/AFCI%20Workshop%202020 »

Poster ID: 41

Abstract: Machine learning systems are increasingly being used to make impactful decisions such as loan applications and criminal justice risk assessments, and as such, ensuring fairness of these systems is critical. This is often challenging as the labels in the data are biased. This paper studies learning fair probability distributions from biased data by explicitly modeling a latent variable that represents a hidden, unbiased label. In particular, we aim to achieve demographic parity by enforcing certain independencies in the learned model. We also show that group fairness guarantees are meaningful only if the distribution used to provide those guarantees indeed captures the real-world data. In order to closely model the data distribution, we employ probabilistic circuits, an expressive and tractable probabilistic model, and propose an algorithm to learn them from incomplete data. We evaluate our approach on a synthetic dataset in which observed labels indeed come from fair labels but with added bias, and demonstrate that the fair labels are successfully retrieved. Moreover, we show on real-world datasets that our approach not only is a better model than existing methods of how the data was generated but also achieves competitive accuracy.

Author Information

YooJung Choi (UCLA)
Guy Van den Broeck (UCLA)

I am an Assistant Professor and Samueli Fellow at UCLA, in the Computer Science Department, where I direct the Statistical and Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI) lab. My research interests are in Machine Learning (Statistical Relational Learning, Tractable Learning), Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (Graphical Models, Lifted Probabilistic Inference, Knowledge Compilation), Applications of Probabilistic Reasoning and Learning (Probabilistic Programming, Probabilistic Databases), and Artificial Intelligence in general.

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