There is a growing interest in societal concerns in machine learning systems, especially in fairness. Multicalibration gives a comprehensive methodology to address group fairness. In this work, we address the multicalibration error and decouple it from the prediction error. The importance of decoupling the fairness metric (multicalibration) and the accuracy (prediction error) is due to the inherent trade-off between the two, and the societal decision regarding the "right tradeoff" (as imposed many times by regulators). Our work gives sample complexity bounds for uniform convergence guarantees of multicalibration error, which implies that regardless of the accuracy, we can guarantee that the empirical and (true) multicalibration errors are close. We emphasize that our results: (1) are more general than previous bounds, as they apply to both agnostic and realizable settings, and do not rely on a specific type of algorithm (such as deferentially private), (2) improve over previous multicalibration sample complexity bounds and (3) implies uniform convergence guarantees for the classical calibration error.
翻译:对机器学习系统的社会关切越来越感兴趣,特别是在公平方面。多校准提供了解决群体公平问题的全面方法。在这项工作中,我们处理多校准错误,并将其与预测错误脱钩。区分公平度(多校准)和准确性(准误差)的重要性在于二者之间的内在权衡,以及社会关于“权利权衡”的决定(监管者多次强制实行这种权衡 ) 。我们的工作为多重校准错误的统一趋同保证提供了样本复杂性界限,这意味着无论准确性如何,我们都可以保证实验和(真实的)多校准错误接近。我们强调,我们的结果:(1) 比以往的界限更为笼统,因为它们既适用于说明性环境又适用于可实现的环境,并且不依赖特定类型的算法(如推迟式私人交易),(2) 改进以前的多校准抽样复杂性界限,(3) 意味着经典校准错误的统一趋同保证。