Skip to main content
Article
Optimising Equal Opportunity Fairness in Model Training
arXiv
  • Aili Shen, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia
  • Xudong Han, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia
  • Trevor Cohn, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia
  • Timothy Baldwin, The University of Melbourne, Australia & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Lea Frermann, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia
Document Type
Article
Abstract

Real-world datasets often encode stereotypes and societal biases. Such biases can be implicitly captured by trained models, leading to biased predictions and exacerbating existing societal preconceptions. Existing debiasing methods, such as adversarial training and removing protected information from representations, have been shown to reduce bias. However, a disconnect between fairness criteria and training objectives makes it difficult to reason theoretically about the effectiveness of different techniques. In this work, we propose two novel training objectives which directly optimise for the widely-used criterion of equal opportunity, and show that they are effective in reducing bias while maintaining high performance over two classification tasks. Copyright © 2022, The Authors. All rights reserved.

DOI
10.48550/arXiv.2205.02393
Publication Date
4-4-2022
Keywords
  • Classification tasks,
  • De-biasing,
  • Equal opportunity,
  • Fairness criterion,
  • Model training,
  • Performance,
  • Real-world datasets,
  • Machine learning,
  • Computation and Language (cs.CL),
  • Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Comments

IR Deposit conditions: non-described

Preprint available on arXiv

Citation Information
A. Shen, X. Han, T. Cohn, T. Baldwin, and L. Frermann, "Optimising Equal Opportunity Fairness in Model Training", 2022, arXiv:2205.02393