When causality meets fairness: A survey

Addressing the problem of fairness is crucial to safely using machine learning algorithms to support decisions that have a critical impact on people's lives, such as job hiring, child maltreatment, disease diagnosis, loan granting, etc. Several notions of fairness have been defined and examined...

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Veröffentlicht in:Journal of logical and algebraic methods in programming Jg. 141; S. 101000
Hauptverfasser: Makhlouf, Karima, Zhioua, Sami, Palamidessi, Catuscia
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Elsevier Inc 01.10.2024
Elsevier
Schlagworte:
Causal inference
Causality
Computer Science
Counterfactual
Fairness
Intervention
Machine learning
Causal inference
Intervention
Counterfactual
Causality
Fairness
Machine learning
counterfactual
machine learning
causal inference
intervention
causality
ISSN:2352-2208
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Zusammenfassung:Addressing the problem of fairness is crucial to safely using machine learning algorithms to support decisions that have a critical impact on people's lives, such as job hiring, child maltreatment, disease diagnosis, loan granting, etc. Several notions of fairness have been defined and examined in the past decade, such as statistical parity and equalized odds. However, the most recent notions of fairness are causal-based and reflect the now widely accepted idea that using causality is necessary to appropriately address the problem of fairness. This paper examines an exhaustive list of causal-based fairness notions and studies their applicability in real-world scenarios. As most causal-based fairness notions are defined in terms of non-observable quantities (e.g., interventions and counterfactuals), their deployment in practice requires computing or estimating those quantities using observational data. This paper offers a comprehensive report of the different approaches to infer causal quantities from observational data, including identifiability (Pearl's SCM framework) and estimation (potential outcome framework). The main contributions of this survey paper are (1) a guideline to help select a suitable causal fairness notion given a specific real-world scenario and (2) a ranking of the fairness notions according to Pearl's causation ladder, indicating how difficult it is to deploy each notion in practice.
ISSN:2352-2208
DOI:10.1016/j.jlamp.2024.101000