Ensuring algorithmic fairness remains a significant challenge in machine learning, particularly as models are increasingly applied across diverse domains. While numerous fairness criteria exist, they often lack generalizability across different machine learning problems. This paper examines the connections and differences among various sparsity measures in promoting fairness and proposes a unified sparsity-based framework for evaluating algorithmic fairness. The framework aligns with existing fairness criteria and demonstrates broad applicability to a wide range of machine learning tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework as an evaluation metric through extensive experiments on a variety of datasets and bias mitigation methods. This work provides a novel perspective to algorithmic fairness by framing it through the lens of sparsity and social equity, offering potential for broader impact on fairness research and applications.

This paper introduces a novel methodology for constructing multiclass ROC curves using the multidimensional Gini index. The proposed methodology leverages the established relationship between the Gini coefficient and the ROC Curve and extends it to multiclass settings through the multidimensional Gini index. The framework is validated by means of two comprehensive case studies in health care and finance. The paper provides a theoretically grounded solution to multiclass performance evaluation, particularly valuable for imbalanced datasets, for which a prudential assessment should take precedence over class frequency considerations.

In a dynamic landscape where portfolios and environments evolve, maintaining the accuracy of pricing models is critical. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically examine concept drift in non-life insurance pricing. We (i) provide an overview of the relevant literature and commonly used methodologies, clarify the distinction between virtual drift and concept drift, and explain their implications for long-run model performance; (ii) review and formalize common performance measures, including the Gini index and deviance loss, and articulate their interpretation; (iii) derive the asymptotic distribution of the Gini index, enabling valid inference and hypothesis testing; and (iv) present a standardized monitoring procedure that indicates when refitting is warranted. We illustrate the framework using a modified real-world portfolio with induced concept drift and discuss practical considerations and pitfalls.

We consider strategy proof mechanisms for facility location which maximize equitability between agents. As is common in the literature, we measure equitability with the Gini index. We first prove a simple but fundamental impossibility result that no strategy proof mechanism can bound the approximation ratio of the optimal Gini index of utilities for one or more facilities. We propose instead computing approximation ratios of the complemented Gini index of utilities, and consider how well both deterministic and randomized mechanisms approximate this. In addition, as Nash welfare is often put forwards as an equitable compromise between egalitarian and utilitarian outcomes, we consider how well mechanisms approximate the Nash welfare.

Clustering is an important problem in data mining. It aims to split the data into groups such that data points in the same group are similar while points in different groups are different under a given similarity metric. Clustering has been successfully applied in many practical applications, such as data grouping in exploratory data analysis, search results categorization, market segmentation etc. Clustering results are often used for further analysis or interpretation. However, directly applying results obtained from usual clustering algorithms may suffer from fairness issues-some cluster may favor data points from one of the subpopulations, i.e., having disproportionally more points. One example of 1 Figure 1: Illustration of the fairness issue in clustering, Points of different color indicate different traits on a sensitive variable, e.g., gender where blue indicates male and red female. Cluster 1 is dominated by females while Cluster 2 by males. Points with an arrow indicate that we might switch its cluster membership assignment to make the clusters less dominated by one subpopulation.

Human networks greatly impact important societal outcomes, including wealth and health inequality, poverty, and bullying. As such, understanding human networks is critical to learning how to promote favorable societal outcomes. As a step toward better understanding human networks, we compare and contrast several methods for learning, from a small data set, models of human behavior in a strategic network game called the Junior High Game (JHG). These modeling methods differ with respect to the assumptions they use to parameterize human behavior (behavior vs. community-aware behavior) and the moments they model (mean vs. distribution). Results show that the highest-performing method, called hCAB, models the distribution of human behavior rather than the mean and assumes humans use community-aware behavior rather than behavior matching. When applied to small societies (6-11 individuals), the hCAB model closely mirrors the population dynamics of human groups (with notable differences). Additionally, in a user study, human participants were unable to distinguish individual hCAB agents from other humans, thus illustrating that the hCAB model also produces plausible (individual) human behavior in this strategic network game.

Telegram has become a major space for political discourse and alternative media. However, its lack of moderation allows misinformation, extremism, and toxicity to spread. While prior research focused on these particular phenomena or topics, these have mostly been examined separately, and a broader understanding of the Telegram ecosystem is still missing. In this work, we fill this gap by conducting a large-scale analysis of the Italian Telegram sphere, leveraging a dataset of 186 million messages from 13,151 chats collected in 2023. Using network analysis, Large Language Models, and toxicity detection tools, we examine how different thematic communities form, align ideologically, and engage in harmful discourse within the Italian cultural context. Results show strong thematic and ideological homophily. We also identify mixed ideological communities where far-left and far-right rhetoric coexist on particular geopolitical issues. Beyond political analysis, we find that toxicity, rather than being isolated in a few extreme chats, appears widely normalized within highly toxic communities. Moreover, we find that Italian discourse primarily targets Black people, Jews, and gay individuals independently of the topic. Finally, we uncover common trend of intra-national hostility, where Italians often attack other Italians, reflecting regional and intra-regional cultural conflicts that can be traced back to old historical divisions. This study provides the first large-scale mapping of the Italian Telegram ecosystem, offering insights into ideological interactions, toxicity, and identity-targets of hate and contributing to research on online toxicity across different cultural and linguistic contexts on Telegram.

How Good Are Large Language Models for Course Recommendation in MOOCs? Shin'ichi Konomi Kyushu University, Japan konomi@artsci.kyushu-u.ac.jp ABSTRACT Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing and are increasingly being integrated into recommendation systems. However, their potential in educational recommendation systems has yet to be fully explored. This paper investigates the use of LLMs as a general-purpose recommendation model, leveraging their vast knowledge derived from large-scale corpora for course recommendation tasks. We explore a variety of approaches, ranging from prompt-based methods to more advanced fine-tuning techniques, and compare their performance against traditional recommendation models. Extensive experiments were conducted on a real-world MOOC dataset, evaluating using LLMs as course recommendation systems across key dimensions such as accuracy, diversity, and novelty. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can achieve good performance comparable to traditional models, highlighting their potential to enhance educational recommendation systems.

Noncooperative multi-agent systems often face coordination challenges due to conflicting preferences among agents. In particular, agents acting in their own self-interest can settle on different equilibria, leading to suboptimal outcomes or even safety concerns. We propose an algorithm named trading auction for consensus (TACo), a decentralized approach that enables noncooperative agents to reach consensus without communicating directly or disclosing private valuations. TACo facilitates coordination through a structured trading-based auction, where agents iteratively select choices of interest and provably reach an agreement within an a priori bounded number of steps. A series of numerical experiments validate that the termination guarantees of TACo hold in practice, and show that TACo achieves a median performance that minimizes the total cost across all agents, while allocating resources significantly more fairly than baseline approaches.

This paper aims at learning a collection of transition matrices of ergodic Markov chains, where at each round the algorithm can select one of the chains and observe which state it fell in. The problem consists in designing a strategy such as the learning will occur uniformly over all chains at the best possible rate. The paper is of theoretical nature, the background on chains is properly introduced, the algorithm is clearly described and thoroughly analyzed. The paper in its current form is a stronger submission than its previous version. It is more focused, the assumptions are clearer, it is more detailed, and an overall better read.