Counterfactual Fairness (CF), which posits that an ML model's outcome on any individual should remain unchanged if they had belonged to a different demographic

For real-world visual datasets (like facial dataset or ImageNet), the unavailability of strict counterfactual data is a common challenge.

For instance, one such notion is'unawareness', which necessitates Additionally, preference-based fairness argues that an algorithm's design should not be solely determined by its creators or regulators but should also incorporate the preferences of those directly A myriad of techniques exist to construct fair models using counterfactual inference. Theorem 2. Assume that R has been generated using Algorithm 2. We have, Pr(R We consider a causal graph shown in Figure 6. The counterfactual data ˇ X were computed by substituting A in the structural function with ˇ A . We implemented our method and the baseline methods as described in Section 5 (since there is no difference between observed data and factual data in this scenario, we have no ICA baseline here). For the CR method, we set the weight of the fairness regularization term as 0.05.

The use of machine learning models in high-stake applications (e.g., healthcare, lending, college admission) has raised growing concerns due to potential biases

Fairness is a central pillar of trustworthy machine learning, especially in domains where accuracy- or profit-driven optimization is insufficient. While most fairness research focuses on supervised learning, fairness in policy learning remains less explored. Because policy learning is interventional, it induces two distinct fairness targets: action fairness (equitable action assignments) and outcome fairness (equitable downstream consequences). Crucially, equalizing actions does not generally equalize outcomes when groups face different constraints or respond differently to the same action. We propose a novel double fairness learning (DFL) framework that explicitly manages the trade-off among three objectives: action fairness, outcome fairness, and value maximization. We integrate fairness directly into a multi-objective optimization problem for policy learning and employ a lexicographic weighted Tchebyshev method that recovers Pareto solutions beyond convex settings, with theoretical guarantees on the regret bounds. Our framework is flexible and accommodates various commonly used fairness notions. Extensive simulations demonstrate improved performance relative to competing methods. In applications to a motor third-party liability insurance dataset and an entrepreneurship training dataset, DFL substantially improves both action and outcome fairness while incurring only a modest reduction in overall value.

In high-stakes domains such as healthcare and hiring, the role of machine learning (ML) in decision-making raises significant fairness concerns. This work focuses on Counterfactual Fairness (CF), which posits that an ML model's outcome on any individual should remain unchanged if they had belonged to a different demographic group.Previous works have proposed methods that guarantee CF. Notwithstanding, their effects on the model's predictive performance remain largely unclear.To fill this gap, we provide a theoretical study on the inherent trade-off between CF and predictive performance in a model-agnostic manner. We first propose a simple but effective method to cast an optimal but potentially unfair predictor into a fair one with a minimal loss of performance.By analyzing the excess risk incurred by perfect CF, we quantify this inherent trade-off. Further analysis on our method's performance with access to only incomplete causal knowledge is also conducted. Built upon this, we propose a practical algorithm that can be applied in such scenarios. Experiments on both synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate the validity of our analysis and methods.

Fair machine learning aims to avoid treating individuals or sub-populations unfavourably based on \textit{sensitive attributes}, such as gender and race. Those methods in fair machine learning that are built on causal inference ascertain discrimination and bias through causal effects. Though causality-based fair learning is attracting increasing attention, current methods assume the true causal graph is fully known. This paper proposes a general method to achieve the notion of counterfactual fairness when the true causal graph is unknown. To select features that lead to counterfactual fairness, we derive the conditions and algorithms to identify ancestral relations between variables on a \textit{Partially Directed Acyclic Graph (PDAG)}, specifically, a class of causal DAGs that can be learned from observational data combined with domain knowledge. Interestingly, we find that counterfactual fairness can be achieved as if the true causal graph were fully known, when specific background knowledge is provided: the sensitive attributes do not have ancestors in the causal graph. Results on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

In large part, the literature has focused on formalizing fairness into quantitative definitions and using them to solve a discrimination problem in a certain dataset.

Machine learning is now being used to make crucial decisions about people's lives.