Handling Conditional Discrimination

Abstract

Historical data used for supervised learning may contain discrimination. We study how to train classifiers on such data, so that they are discrimination free with respect to a given sensitive attribute, e.g., gender. Existing techniques that deal with this problem aim at removing all discrimination and do not take into account that part of the discrimination may be explainable by other attributes, such as, e.g., education level. In this context, we introduce and analyze the issue of conditional non-discrimination in classifier design. We show that some of the differences in decisions across the sensitive groups can be explainable and hence tolerable. We observe that in such cases, the existing discrimination aware techniques will introduce a reverse discrimination, which is undesirable as well. Therefore, we develop local techniques for handling conditional discrimination when one of the attributes is considered to be explanatory. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the new local techniques remove exactly the bad discrimination, allowing differences in decisions as long as they are explainable.