Targeted Learning for Inference on Data Fairness

Abstract

As algorithmic decision making has become increasingly ubiquitous even in high-stakes settings, significant effort has been invested in defining, detecting, and eliminating unfair model-driven outcomes. Prior work has largely focused on estimating the fairness properties of a given predictive model, and quantifying uncertainty based on variability in a fixed model's performance across evaluation datasets. Alternatively, we can also ask about uncertainty that the model inherits from its training data; here we evaluate data fairness - fairness in the data generating process used for training. We perform inference on data fairness using targeted learning, a flexible framework for nonparametric inference, and derive estimators for demographic parity, equal opportunity, and conditional mutual information. Simulations show that our data fairness estimators improve confidence-interval coverage and reduce false detections of population unfairness relative to fixed-model inference. We also demonstrate their application to real data.