Conditional Learning of Fair Representations

We propose a novel algorithm for learning fair representations that can simultaneously mitigate two notions of disparity among different demographic subgroups. Two key components underpinning the design of our algorithm are balanced error rate and conditional alignment of representations. In settings that have historically had discrimination, we are interested in defining fairness with respect to a protected group, the group which has historically been disadvantaged. Among many recent attempts to achieve algorithmic fairness (Dwork et al., 2012; Hardt et al., 2016; Zemel et al., 2013; Zafar et al., 2015), learning fair representations has attracted increasing attention However, it has long been empirically observed (Calders et al., 2009) and recently been proved (Zhao Part of this work was done when Han Zhao was visiting the V ector Institute, Toronto. In this work, we provide an affirmative answer to the above question by proposing an algorithm to align the conditional distributions (on the target variable) of representations across different demographic subgroups.