A Local Method for Satisfying Interventional Fairness with Partially Known Causal Graphs

Developing fair automated machine learning algorithms is critical in making safe and trustworthy decisions. Many causality-based fairness notions have been proposed to address the above issues by quantifying the causal connections between sensitive attributes and decisions, and when the true causal graph is fully known, certain algorithms that achieve interventional fairness have been proposed. However, when the true causal graph is unknown, it is still challenging to effectively and efficiently exploit partially directed acyclic graphs (PDAGs) to achieve interventional fairness. To exploit the PDAGs for achieving interventional fairness, previous methods have been built on variable selection or causal effect identification, but limited to reduced prediction accuracy or strong assumptions. In this paper, we propose a general min-max optimization framework that can achieve interventional fairness with promising prediction accuracy and can be extended to maximally oriented PDAGs (MPDAGs) with added background knowledge.