Auditing fairness under unawareness through counterfactual reasoning

Giandomenico Cornacchia, Vito Walter Anelli, Giovanni Maria Biancofiore, Fedelucio Narducci, Claudio Pomo, Azzurra Ragone, Eugenio Di Sciascio

Abstract: Highlights•The fairness under unawareness setting is insufficient in preventing decision bias•Sensitive user characteristics can be recovered by a non-sensitive data classifier•A new counterfactual methodology for revealing decision unfairness is proposed•The proposed counterfactual metric can better quantify decision discrimination•The methodology has been evaluated on two state-of-the-art datasets, Adult and German