On the Choice of Fairness: Finding Representative Fairness Metrics for a Given Context

It is of critical importance to be aware of the historical discrimination embedded in the data and to consider a fairness measure to reduce bias throughout the predictive modeling pipeline. Various notions of fairness have been defined, though choosing an appropriate metric is cumbersome. Trade-offs and impossibility theorems make such selection even more complicated and controversial. In practice, users (perhaps regular data scientists) should understand each of the measures and (if possible) manually explore the combinatorial space of different measures before they can decide which combination is preferred based on the context, the use case, and regulations. To alleviate the burden of selecting fairness notions for consideration, we propose a framework that automatically discovers the correlations and trade-offs between different pairs of measures for a given context. Our framework dramatically reduces the exploration space by finding a small subset of measures that represent others and highlighting the trade-offs between them. This allows users to view unfairness from various perspectives that might otherwise be ignored due to the sheer size of the exploration space. We showcase the validity of the proposal using comprehensive experiments on real-world benchmark data sets.