Cited by 647Ethics and Social Impacts of AIExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 360 of the 366 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 480 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Fairness in Machine Learning: A Survey

Open access
Caton, Simon, Haas, Christian·2024·ACM Computing Surveys

Abstract

When Machine Learning technologies are used in contexts that affect citizens, companies as well as researchers need to be confident that there will not be any unexpected social implications, such as bias towards gender, ethnicity, and/or people with disabilities. There is significant literature on approaches to mitigate bias and promote fairness, yet the area is complex and hard to penetrate for newcomers to the domain. This article seeks to provide an overview of the different schools of thought and approaches that aim to increase the fairness of Machine Learning. It organizes approaches into the widely accepted framework of pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing methods, subcategorizing into a further 11 method areas. Although much of the literature emphasizes binary classification, a discussion of fairness in regression, recommender systems, and unsupervised learning is also provided along with a selection of currently available open source libraries. The article concludes by summarizing open challenges articulated as five dilemmas for fairness research.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This survey provides an entry-level overview of fairness in machine learning, organizing technical interventions into pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing approaches and subcategorizing them into 11 method areas. It also reviews fairness metrics, discusses settings beyond binary classification, and concludes with five open dilemmas for fairness research.

Key findings

  • The paper organizes fairness interventions into the widely accepted framework of pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing methods, with a further 11 method areas; it notes that the literature is dominated by binary classification.
  • It summarizes fairness metrics into group-based categories (parity-based, confusion matrix-based, calibration-based, score-based) and individual/counterfactual metrics, and states that many fairness notions are difficult or impossible to combine.
  • It identifies five dilemmas for future research: fairness vs. model performance; disagreement/incompatibility of fairness notions; tensions with context and policy; democratization of ML vs. the fairness skills gap; and scientific advancement vs. the reality of data.
  • It notes that beyond binary classification, fairness has been studied in regression, recommender systems/ranking, and unsupervised methods such as fair clustering, but says these areas are less comprehensive in the survey.

Methods

  • Design: a survey/overview article that synthesizes existing fairness literature rather than presenting new empirical experiments.
  • Scope: focuses on technical approaches to fairness in classification and closely related domains such as regression and rating predictions; refers elsewhere for NLP and reinforcement learning.
  • Analysis: organizes approaches by intervention stage and method area, discusses metrics and trade-offs, and lists open source toolkits in an online appendix.

Limitations

  • The paper states that the fairness area is complex and hard to penetrate for newcomers, that there is no universal means to measure fairness, and that no clear guidelines exist on which measures are best.
  • The paper states that much of the literature emphasizes binary classification, that beyond-binary-classification coverage is less comprehensive, and that there is a need for more realistic datasets, better industry engagement, and more runtime benchmarking outside clustering.
  • Evident from the text: the survey is not a systematic meta-review; it explicitly notes the absence of a structured meta-review of fairness approaches and says offering advice on approach selection is unrealistic.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3616865

Cites

360 of 360 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

0 of 480 cited sources checked · 0 supported · 0 flagged

Show all 112 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 142
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 65
190 of 190
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The area of fairness in ML is complex and hard to penetrate for newcomers to the domain.

    “There is signiicant literature on approaches to mitigate bias and promote fairness, yet the area is complex and hard to penetrate for newcomers to the domain.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Current ML libraries often do not (yet) accommodate means to ascertain social accountability.

    “All of this results in an array of challenges that can be overwhelming, and current ML libraries often do not (yet) accommodate means to ascertain social accountability.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Fairness is a complex topic that has to try and balance many different contexts, multi-faceted sociocultural concepts, aspects of equality and diversity, and ethical principles.

    “However, fairness is a complex topic that has to try and balance many diferent contexts, multi-faceted sociocultural concepts (beyond race, gender, age etc.), aspects of equality and diversity, and ethical principles such as whether it is even appropriate to use ML at all.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Sensitive variables often are correlated with other variables in the data.

    “For instance, sensitive variables often are correlated with other variables in the data, and approaches focusing on immunity aim to prevent these indirect efects from resulting in discrimination measured through the sensitive variable.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Training data often reflects some form of underlying discrimination.

    “Approaches using causal methods recognise that the training data often relects some form of underlying discrimination.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Missing data provides specific problems for transformation approaches, as it is unclear how to deal with such data samples.

    “5) missing data provides speciic problems for transformation approaches, as it is unclear how to deal with such data samples.”
6 of 6

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • Immunity to sensitive variables both addresses and overlooks proxies

    Minor

    The synopsis says immunity addresses indirect effects of sensitive variables through correlated input variables. The commentary then says immunity overlooks relationships with proxy variables, which are those correlated inputs.

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Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 366 references

6 of the 366 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 21

  1. Sara Ahmadian, Alessandro Epasto, Ravi Kumar, and Mohammad Mahdian. 2020. Fair correlation clustering. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. PMLR, 4195–4205.
  2. Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner. 2016. Machine bias. ProPublica May 23 (2016).
  3. Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt, and Arvind Narayanan. 2019. Fairness and Machine Learning. fairmlbook.org.
  4. Suman Bera, Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Nicolas Flores, and Maryam Negahbani. 2019. Fair algorithms for clustering. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32. Curran Associates, Inc., 4954–4965.
  5. Amanda Bower, Sarah N. Kitchen, Laura Niss, Martin J. Strauss, Alexander Vargas, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. 2017. Fair pipelines. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.00391 (2017). · arXiv
  6. Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford. 2011. Six provocations for big data. In A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, Vol. 21. Oxford Internet Institute Oxford, UK.
  7. R. Wirth and J. Hipp. 2000. CRISP-DM: Towards a standard process model for data mining. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Practical Applications of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Vol. 1 29–39.
  8. Anshuman Chhabra, Adish Singla, and Prasant Mohapatra. 2022. Fair clustering using antidote data. In Proceedings of the Algorithmic Fairness through the Lens of Causality and Robustness Workshop. PMLR, 19–39.
  9. 10.2759/177365 · DOI
  10. Bo Cowgill and Catherine Tucker. 2017. Algorithmic bias: A counterfactual perspective. NSF Trustwor. Algor. (2017).
  11. Michele Donini, Luca Oneto, Shai Ben-David, John S. Shawe-Taylor, and Massimiliano Pontil. 2018. Empirical risk minimization under fairness constraints. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Curran Associates, Inc., 2791–2801.
  12. Bo Gao. 2015. Exploratory Visualization Design towards Online Social Network Privacy and Data Literacy. Ph.D. Dissertation. KU Leuven.
  13. Bryce W. Goodman. 2016. Economic models of (algorithmic) discrimination. In Proceedings of the 29th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol. 6.
  14. Toshihiro Kamishima, Shotaro Akaho, Hideki Asoh, and Jun Sakuma. 2018. Recommendation independence. In Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. PMLR, 187–201.
  15. Lydia T. Liu, Sarah Dean, Esther Rolf, Max Simchowitz, and Moritz Hardt. 2018. Delayed impact of fair machine learning. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 3150–3158.
  16. Bruce McKeown and Dan B. Thomas. 2013. Q methodology. Quantit. Applic. Soc. Sci. 66 (2013).
  17. 10.5555/1462129 · DOI
  18. Hao Wang, Berk Ustun, and Flavio P. Calmon. 2018. Avoiding disparate impact with counterfactual distributions. In Proceedings of the NeurIPS Workshop on Ethical, Social and Governance Issues in AI.
  19. Lequn Wang, Yiwei Bai, Wen Sun, and Thorsten Joachims. 2021. Fairness of exposure in stochastic bandits. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 10686–10696.
  20. Lauren Weber and Elizabeth Dwoskin. 2014. Are workplace personality tests fair. Wall Street J. 29 (2014).
  21. 10.5555/3367032.3367238 · DOI

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Metadata

Authors
Caton, S., & Haas, C.
Affiliations
  • University College Dublin (IE)
  • Vienna University of Economics and Business (AT)
Venue
ACM Computing Surveys
Published
2024-04-09
Volume
56
Issue
7
Pages
1-38
ISSN
  • 0360-0300 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7341
OpenAlex
W3092541244
Cited by
646
References
366
Citations by year
2026: 140 · 2025: 205 · 2024: 145
FWCI
137.81
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Computing Surveys (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Keywords
algorithmic fairness, algorithmic bias, post-processing, demographic parity, equal opportunities

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