Machine Learning (ML) models trained on data from multiple demographic groups can inherit representation disparity (Hashimoto et al., 2018) that may exist in the data: the model may be less favorable to groups contributing less to the training process; this in turn can degrade population retention in these groups over time, and exacerbate representation disparity in the long run. In this study, we seek to understand the interplay between ML decisions and the underlying group representation, how they evolve in a sequential framework, and how the use of fairness criteria plays a role in this process. We show that the representation disparity can easily worsen over time under a natural user dynamics (arrival and departure) model when decisions are made based on a commonly used objective and fairness criteria, resulting in some groups diminishing entirely from the sample pool in the long run. It highlights the fact that fairness criteria have to be defined while taking into consideration the impact of decisions on user dynamics. Toward this end, we explain how a proper fairness criterion can be selected based on a general user dynamics model.

Machine learning models developed from real-world data can inherit pre-existing bias in the dataset. When these models are used to inform decisions involving humans, it may exhibit similar discrimination against sensitive attributes (e.g., gender and race) [

If we allow arrival to be a function of, say model accuracy (Sec 3.4), then arrival indeed may diminish; in this As illustrated in Figure 1(a) in Appendix K.3, if user We believe there is value in performing long-term experiments to better understand such dynamics. We will adjust figures, add forward references, fix typos, and discuss intuition/comparisons. We will be happy to add this result. We trained binary classifiers over Adult dataset by minimizing empirical loss where features are individual info (sex, race, nationality, etc.) and labels their annual income ( These results (shown on the right) are consistent with the paper.

Machine learning models developed from real-world data can inherit pre-existing bias in the dataset. When these models are used to inform decisions involving humans, it may exhibit similar discrimination against sensitive attributes (e.g., gender and race) [

If we allow arrival to be a function of, say model accuracy (Sec 3.4), then arrival indeed may diminish; in this As illustrated in Figure 1(a) in Appendix K.3, if user We believe there is value in performing long-term experiments to better understand such dynamics. We will adjust figures, add forward references, fix typos, and discuss intuition/comparisons. We will be happy to add this result. We trained binary classifiers over Adult dataset by minimizing empirical loss where features are individual info (sex, race, nationality, etc.) and labels their annual income ( These results (shown on the right) are consistent with the paper.

Machine Learning (ML) models trained on data from multiple demographic groups can inherit representation disparity (Hashimoto et al., 2018) that may exist in the data: the model may be less favorable to groups contributing less to the training process; this in turn can degrade population retention in these groups over time, and exacerbate representation disparity in the long run. In this study, we seek to understand the interplay between ML decisions and the underlying group representation, how they evolve in a sequential framework, and how the use of fairness criteria plays a role in this process. We show that the representation disparity can easily worsen over time under a natural user dynamics (arrival and departure) model when decisions are made based on a commonly used objective and fairness criteria, resulting in some groups diminishing entirely from the sample pool in the long run. It highlights the fact that fairness criteria have to be defined while taking into consideration the impact of decisions on user dynamics. Toward this end, we explain how a proper fairness criterion can be selected based on a general user dynamics model.

There have been tremendous efforts over the past decades dedicated to the generation of realistic graphs in a variety of domains, ranging from social networks to computer networks, from gene regulatory networks to online transaction networks. Despite the remarkable success, the vast majority of these works are unsupervised in nature and are typically trained to minimize the expected graph reconstruction loss, which would result in the representation disparity issue in the generated graphs, i.e., the protected groups (often minorities) contribute less to the objective and thus suffer from systematically higher errors. In this paper, we aim to tailor graph generation to downstream mining tasks by leveraging label information and user-preferred parity constraints. In particular, we start from the investigation of representation disparity in the context of graph generative models. To mitigate the disparity, we propose a fairness-aware graph generative model named FairGen. Our model jointly trains a label-informed graph generation module and a fair representation learning module by progressively learning the behaviors of the protected and unprotected groups, from the `easy' concepts to the `hard' ones. In addition, we propose a generic context sampling strategy for graph generative models, which is proven to be capable of fairly capturing the contextual information of each group with a high probability. Experimental results on seven real-world data sets, including web-based graphs, demonstrate that FairGen (1) obtains performance on par with state-of-the-art graph generative models across nine network properties, (2) mitigates the representation disparity issues in the generated graphs, and (3) substantially boosts the model performance by up to 17% in downstream tasks via data augmentation.

Machine Learning (ML) models trained on data from multiple demographic groups can inherit representation disparity (Hashimoto et al., 2018) that may exist in the data: the model may be less favorable to groups contributing less to the training process; this in turn can degrade population retention in these groups over time, and exacerbate representation disparity in the long run. In this study, we seek to understand the interplay between ML decisions and the underlying group representation, how they evolve in a sequential framework, and how the use of fairness criteria plays a role in this process. We show that the representation disparity can easily worsen over time under a natural user dynamics (arrival and departure) model when decisions are made based on a commonly used objective and fairness criteria, resulting in some groups diminishing entirely from the sample pool in the long run. It highlights the fact that fairness criteria have to be defined while taking into consideration the impact of decisions on user dynamics. Toward this end, we explain how a proper fairness criterion can be selected based on a general user dynamics model.

Machine learning models trained on data from multiple demographic groups can inherit representation disparity (Hashimoto et al., 2018) that may exist in the data: the group contributing less to the training process may suffer higher loss in model accuracy; this in turn can degrade population retention in these groups over time in terms of their contribution to the training process of future models, which then exacerbates representation disparity in the long run. In this study, we seek to understand the interplay between the model accuracy and the underlying group representation and how they evolve in a sequential decision setting over an infinite horizon, and how the use of fair machine learning plays a role in this process. Using a simple user dynamics (arrival and departure) model, we characterize the long-term property of using machine learning models under a set of fairness criteria imposed on each stage of the decision process, including the commonly used statistical parity and equal opportunity fairness. We show that under this particular arrival/departure model, both these criteria cause the representation disparity to worsen over time, resulting in groups diminishing entirely from the sample pool, while the criterion of equalized loss fares much better. Our results serve to highlight the fact that fairness cannot be defined outside the larger feedback loop where past actions taken by users (who are either subject to the decisions made by the algorithm or whose data are used to train the algorithm or both) will determine future observations and decisions.

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2018 will be held July 10–15 in Stockholm, Sweden. Yesterday, from more than 600 accepted papers, the prestigious conference announced its Best Paper Awards. Two papers shared top honours. Researchers Anish Athalye of MIT and Nicholas Carlini and David Wagner of UC Berkeley's Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples; and Delayed Impact of Fair Machine Learning, from a UC Berkeley research group led by Lydia T. Liu and Sarah Dean. The Best Paper Runner Up Awards go to Near Optimal Frequent Directions for Sketching Dense and Sparse Matrices, from Professor Zengfeng Huang of Fudan University; The Mechanics of n-Player Differentiable Games from DeepMind and University of Oxford's David Balduzzi and Sebastien Racaiere, James Martens, Jakob Foerster, Karl Tuyls and Thore Graepel; and Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization, from a Stanford research group including Tatsunori B. Hashimoto, Megha Srivastava, Hongseok Namkoong, and Percy Liang.