论文标题
迈向平衡排名公平和算法实用程序平衡的事后调整
Towards Model-Agnostic Post-Hoc Adjustment for Balancing Ranking Fairness and Algorithm Utility
论文作者
论文摘要
旨在学习一个评分函数的两分排名将在需要样本优先级的各种应用中广泛采用。最近,人们对学到的评分函数是否会导致敏感属性定义的不同保护组的系统差异引起人们的关注。尽管公平与性能之间可能会取消权衡,但在本文中,我们提出了一个模型不可知论的后加工框架,用于在两部分排名方案中平衡它们。具体而言,我们通过直接调整跨组样本的相对顺序来最大化效用和公平性的加权总和。通过将此问题提出为识别不同保护组的最佳翘曲路径,我们提出了一种非参数方法,通过动态编程过程搜索这种最佳路径。我们的方法与各种分类模型兼容,适用于各种排名公平指标。在基准数据集和两个现实世界中的电子健康记录存储库中进行的全面实验表明,我们的方法可以在算法实用程序和排名公平之间取得巨大的平衡。此外,当面对较少的训练样本以及训练和测试排名评分分布之间的差异时,我们在实验中验证方法的鲁棒性。
Bipartite ranking, which aims to learn a scoring function that ranks positive individuals higher than negative ones from labeled data, is widely adopted in various applications where sample prioritization is needed. Recently, there have been rising concerns on whether the learned scoring function can cause systematic disparity across different protected groups defined by sensitive attributes. While there could be trade-off between fairness and performance, in this paper we propose a model agnostic post-processing framework for balancing them in the bipartite ranking scenario. Specifically, we maximize a weighted sum of the utility and fairness by directly adjusting the relative ordering of samples across groups. By formulating this problem as the identification of an optimal warping path across different protected groups, we propose a non-parametric method to search for such an optimal path through a dynamic programming process. Our method is compatible with various classification models and applicable to a variety of ranking fairness metrics. Comprehensive experiments on a suite of benchmark data sets and two real-world patient electronic health record repositories show that our method can achieve a great balance between the algorithm utility and ranking fairness. Furthermore, we experimentally verify the robustness of our method when faced with the fewer training samples and the difference between training and testing ranking score distributions.