Improving Fairness in Budget-constrained Algorithmic Decision-making

Improving Fairness in Budget-constrained Algorithmic Decision-making
Author: Michiel Anton Bakker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

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The last five years have seen a vast increase in academic and popular interest in “fair” machine learning. But while the community has made significant progress towards developing algorithmic interventions to mitigate unfairness, research has focused predominantly on static classification settings. Real-world algorithmic decision making, however, increasingly happens in more dynamic settings. In this thesis, we will study fairness in some of these settings. The first part focuses on mitigating unfairness in settings in which decision makers can choose to spend part of a limited budget on acquiring more information for individuals. For example, a doctor who is unsure about a diagnosis can first decide to conduct additional tests before making a final decision. Studying fairness in this budget-constrained decision-making setting is important not only because of its applicability to a wide range of domains but also because it offers a novel perspective on how fairness can be defined and improved. We will propose three methods for achieving fairness in this setting that provide guarantees at the level of a population subgroup or at the level of an individual. The second part of the thesis studies a real-world budget-constrained application of algorithmic decision-making. We detect bias in statistical models that are currently deployed to support the distribution of social programs among millions of households in the developing world. Finally, we propose a domain-specific decision support tool that addresses bias in this domain while accounting for the complex multi-stakeholder decision-making process.

Fairness in Algorithmic Services

Fairness in Algorithmic Services
Author: Allison Koenecke
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN:

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Algorithmically guided decisions are becoming increasingly prevalent and, if left unchecked, can amplify pre-existing societal biases. This thesis employs modern computational tools to examine the equity of decision-making in two complex systems: automated speech recognition and online advertising. Firstly, I demonstrate large racial disparities in the performance of popular commercial speech-to-text systems developed by Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, a pattern likely stemming from a lack of diversity in the data used to train the systems. These results point to hurdles faced by African Americans in using widespread tools driven by speech recognition technology. Secondly, I propose a methodological framework for online advertisers to determine a demographically equitable allocation of individuals being shown ads for SNAP (food stamp) benefits. In particular, I discuss how to formulate fair decisions considering budget-constrained trade-offs between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking SNAP applicants. Both application domains exemplify processes to ameliorate demographic-based disparate impact arising from decisions made by online platforms, with the ultimate goal of uplifting underserved communities.

Fair and Unbiased Algorithmic Decision Making

Fair and Unbiased Algorithmic Decision Making
Author: Songül Tolan
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

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Machine learning algorithms are now frequently used in sensitive contexts that substantially affect the course of human lives, such as credit lending or criminal justice. This is driven by the idea that 'objective' machines base their decisions solely on facts and remain unaffected by human cognitive biases, discriminatory tendencies or emotions. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence showing that algorithms can inherit or even perpetuate human biases in their decision making when they are based on data that contains biased human decisions. This has led to a call for fairness-aware machine learning. However, fairness is a complex concept which is also reflected in the attempts to formalize fairness for algorithmic decision making. Statistical formalizations of fairness lead to a long list of criteria that are each flawed (or harmful even) in different contexts. Moreover, inherent tradeoffs in these criteria make it impossible to unify them in one general framework. Thus, fairness constraints in algorithms have to be specific to the domains to which the algorithms are applied. In the future, research in algorithmic decision making systems should be aware of data and developer biases and add a focus on transparency to facilitate regular fairness audits.

Bias and Fairness in Algorithmic Hiring Systems

Bias and Fairness in Algorithmic Hiring Systems
Author: Prasanna Parasurama
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre:
ISBN:

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Algorithms are becoming increasingly prevalent in the hiring process. Whether it is a recruiter using LinkedIn's recommendation algorithm to find potential candidates or a hiring manager utilizing a resume screening algorithm to shortlist candidates, algorithms are increasingly used to assist human hiring decisions. These algorithms afford exciting opportunities for improving the efficiency of the hiring process but also pose several challenges along the lines of bias and fairness. This dissertation aims to investigate algorithmic hiring systems, with a particular emphasis on issues of bias, fairness, and diversity. The first chapter examines the interplay between algorithmic fairness constraints and human decision-making in hiring, highlighting the need for algorithms to be complementary to human decision-making. The second chapter studies how supply and demand-side choices in LinkedIn talent sourcing contribute to occupational segregation, contextualizing algorithmic hiring in the broader hiring process. The third chapter demonstrates how advances in machine learning algorithms can provide insight into the mechanisms underlying hiring bias. Finally, the fourth chapter builds on these findings and investigates the design and evaluation of fair resume screening algorithms.

Trusted Data, revised and expanded edition

Trusted Data, revised and expanded edition
Author: Thomas Hardjono
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0262356066

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How to create an Internet of Trusted Data in which insights from data can be extracted without collecting, holding, or revealing the underlying data. Trusted Data describes a data architecture that places humans and their societal values at the center of the discussion. By involving people from all parts of the ecosystem of information, this new approach allows us to realize the benefits of data-driven algorithmic decision making while minimizing the risks and unintended consequences. It proposes a software architecture and legal framework for an Internet of Trusted Data that provides safe, secure access for everyone and protects against bias, unfairness, and other unintended effects. This approach addresses issues of data privacy, security, ownership, and trust by allowing insights to be extracted from data held by different people, companies, or governments without collecting, holding, or revealing the underlying data. The software architecture, called Open Algorithms, or OPAL, sends algorithms to databases rather than copying or sharing data. The data is protected by existing firewalls; only encrypted results are shared. Data never leaves its repository. A higher security architecture, ENIGMA, built on OPAL, is fully encrypted. Contributors Michiel Bakker, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Daniel Greenwood, Thomas Hardjoni, Jake Kendall, Cameron Kerry, Bruno Lepri, Alexander Lipton, Takeo Nishikata, Alejandro Noriega-Campero, Nuria Oliver, Alex Pentland, David L. Shrier, Jacopo Staiano, Guy Zyskind An MIT Connection Science and Engineering Book

The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of Algorithms

The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of Algorithms
Author: Woodrow Barfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1327
Release: 2020-11-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108663184

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Algorithms are a fundamental building block of artificial intelligence - and, increasingly, society - but our legal institutions have largely failed to recognize or respond to this reality. The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of Algorithms, which features contributions from US, EU, and Asian legal scholars, discusses the specific challenges algorithms pose not only to current law, but also - as algorithms replace people as decision makers - to the foundations of society itself. The work includes wide coverage of the law as it relates to algorithms, with chapters analyzing how human biases have crept into algorithmic decision-making about who receives housing or credit, the length of sentences for defendants convicted of crimes, and many other decisions that impact constitutionally protected groups. Other issues covered in the work include the impact of algorithms on the law of free speech, intellectual property, and commercial and human rights law.

Essays on Trustworthy Data-driven Decision Making

Essays on Trustworthy Data-driven Decision Making
Author: Nian Si
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

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Data-driven decision-making systems are deployed ubiquitously in practice, and they have been drastically changing the world and people's daily life. As more and more decisions are made by automatic data-driven systems, it becomes increasingly critical to ensure that such systems are \textit{responsible} and \textit{trustworthy}. In this thesis, I study decision-making problems in realistic contexts and build practical, reliable, and trustworthy methods for their solutions. Specifically, I will discuss the robustness, safety, and fairness issues in such systems. In the first part, we enhance the robustness of decision-making systems via distributionally robust optimization. Statistical errors and distributional shifts are two key factors that downgrade models' performance in deploying environments, even if the models perform well in the training environment. We use distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to design robust algorithms that account for statistical errors and distributional shifts. In Chapter 2, we study distributionally robust policy learning using historical observational data in the presence of distributional shifts. We first present a policy evaluation procedure that allows us to assess how well the policy does under the worst-case environment shift. We then establish a central limit theorem for this proposed policy evaluation scheme. Leveraging this evaluation scheme, we further propose a novel learning algorithm that is able to learn a policy that is robust to adversarial perturbations and unknown covariate shifts with a performance guarantee based on the theory of uniform convergence. Finally, we empirically test the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in synthetic datasets and demonstrate that it provides the robustness that is missing using standard policy learning algorithms. We conclude the paper by providing a comprehensive application of our methods in the context of a real-world voting dataset. In Chapter 3, we focus on the impact of statistical errors in distributionally robust optimization. We study the asymptotic normality of distributionally robust estimators as well as the properties of an optimal confidence region induced by the Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization formulation. In the second part, we study the A/B tests under a safety budget. Safety is crucial to the deployment of any new features in online platforms, as a minor mistake can deteriorate the whole system. Therefore, A/B tests are the standard practice to ensure the safety of new features before launch. However, A/B tests themselves may still be risky as the new features are exposed to real user traffic. We formulated and studied optimal A/B testing experimental design that minimizes the probability of false selection under pre-specified safety budgets. In our formulation based on ranking and selection, experiments need to stop immediately if the safety budgets are exhausted before the experiment horizon. We apply large deviations theory to characterize optimal A/B testing policies and design associated asymptotically optimal algorithms for A/B testing with safety constraints. In the third part, we study the fairness testing problem. Algorithmic decisions may still possess biases and could be unfair to different genders and races. Testing whether a given machine learning algorithm is fair emerges as a question of first-order importance. In this part, We present a statistical testing framework to detect if a given machine learning classifier fails to satisfy a wide range of group fairness notions. The proposed test is a flexible, interpretable, and statistically rigorous tool for auditing whether exhibited biases are intrinsic to the algorithm or due to the randomness in the data. The statistical challenges, which may arise from multiple impact criteria that define group fairness and are discontinuous on model parameters, are conveniently tackled by projecting the empirical measure onto the set of group-fair probability models using optimal transport. This statistic is efficiently computed using linear programming, and its asymptotic distribution is explicitly obtained. The proposed framework can also be used to test composite fairness hypotheses and fairness with multiple sensitive attributes. The optimal transport testing formulation improves interpretability by characterizing the minimal covariate perturbations that eliminate the bias observed in the audit.

Fair Or Unbiased Algorithmic Decision-Making? A Review of the Literature on Digital Economics

Fair Or Unbiased Algorithmic Decision-Making? A Review of the Literature on Digital Economics
Author: Grazia Cecere
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:

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Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are being used increasingly to automate tasks and decision-making processes, and to predict user behavior. Although AI has been implemented and studied in depth in the computer science, economics and management fields research on AI is relatively new. As digitization lowers the costs of hosting and collecting data, AI and algorithms are becoming more frequent in several sectors and particularly digital environments. While AI has been designed to improve and accelerate information processing, there are serious concerns that algorithmic decision-making could result in unexpected correlations and unintentional biases. This calls for a better understanding of how algorithms can be used and the potential positive and negative outcomes identified in the literature. We review the empirical and theoretical literature highlighting the most critical issues inherent in algorithmic decision-making in the digital economy. We identify the expected and unexpected effects of the use of algorithms, and their application in different sectors. We also discuss the trade-off between fairness and unbiased algorithmic decision-making and provide some practical implications and directions for future research.

Multi-Objective Decision Making

Multi-Objective Decision Making
Author: Diederik M. Roijers
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2017-04-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1681731827

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Many real-world decision problems have multiple objectives. For example, when choosing a medical treatment plan, we want to maximize the efficacy of the treatment, but also minimize the side effects. These objectives typically conflict, e.g., we can often increase the efficacy of the treatment, but at the cost of more severe side effects. In this book, we outline how to deal with multiple objectives in decision-theoretic planning and reinforcement learning algorithms. To illustrate this, we employ the popular problem classes of multi-objective Markov decision processes (MOMDPs) and multi-objective coordination graphs (MO-CoGs). First, we discuss different use cases for multi-objective decision making, and why they often necessitate explicitly multi-objective algorithms. We advocate a utility-based approach to multi-objective decision making, i.e., that what constitutes an optimal solution to a multi-objective decision problem should be derived from the available information about user utility. We show how different assumptions about user utility and what types of policies are allowed lead to different solution concepts, which we outline in a taxonomy of multi-objective decision problems. Second, we show how to create new methods for multi-objective decision making using existing single-objective methods as a basis. Focusing on planning, we describe two ways to creating multi-objective algorithms: in the inner loop approach, the inner workings of a single-objective method are adapted to work with multi-objective solution concepts; in the outer loop approach, a wrapper is created around a single-objective method that solves the multi-objective problem as a series of single-objective problems. After discussing the creation of such methods for the planning setting, we discuss how these approaches apply to the learning setting. Next, we discuss three promising application domains for multi-objective decision making algorithms: energy, health, and infrastructure and transportation. Finally, we conclude by outlining important open problems and promising future directions.

Algorithmic Decision Theory

Algorithmic Decision Theory
Author: Saša Pekeč
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030314898

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This book constitutes the conference proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory, ADT 2019, held in Durham, NC, USA, in October 2019. The 10 full papers presented together with 7 short papers were carefully selected from 31 submissions. The papers focus on algorithmic decision theory broadly defined, seeking to bring together researchers and practitioners coming from diverse areas of computer science, economics and operations research in order to improve the theory and practice of modern decision support.