Mathematical Notions vs. Human Perception of Fairness: A Descriptive Approach to Fairness for Machine Learning

Abstract

Fairness for Machine Learning has received considerable attention, recently. Various mathematical formulations of fairness have been proposed, and it has been shown that it is impossible to satisfy all of them simultaneously. The literature so far has dealt with these impossibility results by quantifying the tradeoffs between different formulations of fairness. Our work takes a different perspective on this issue. Rather than requiring all notions of fairness to (partially) hold at the same time, we ask which one of them is the most appropriate given the societal domain in which the decision-making model is to be deployed. We take a descriptive approach and set out to identify the notion of fairness that best captures \emph{lay people's perception of fairness}. We run adaptive experiments designed to pinpoint the most compatible notion of fairness with each participant's choices through a small number of tests. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the most simplistic mathematical definition of fairness---namely, demographic parity---most closely matches people's idea of fairness in two distinct application scenarios. This conclusion remains intact even when we explicitly tell the participants about the alternative, more complicated definitions of fairness, and we reduce the cognitive burden of evaluating those notions for them. Our findings have important implications for the Fair ML literature and the discourse on formalizing algorithmic fairness.

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• Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Factors Influencing Perceived Fairness in Algorithmic Decision-Making: Algorithm Outcomes, Development Procedures, and Individual Differences
• The Challenge of Imputation in Explainable Artificial Intelligence Models
• What is fair? Exploring the artists' perspective on the fairness of music streaming platforms
• Fairness Preferences, Actual and Hypothetical: A Study of Crowdworker Incentives
• FARF: A Fair and Adaptive Random Forests Classifier