A Reduction to Binary Approach for Debiasing Multiclass DatasetsDownload PDF

Published: 31 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 12 Mar 2024NeurIPS 2022 AcceptReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Fairness, Classification, Demographic Parity, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Healthcare
TL;DR: We introduce a preprocessing algorithm for debiasing multiclass datasets with non-binary sensitive attributes.
Abstract: We propose a novel reduction-to-binary (R2B) approach that enforces demographic parity for multiclass classification with non-binary sensitive attributes via a reduction to a sequence of binary debiasing tasks. We prove that R2B satisfies optimality and bias guarantees and demonstrate empirically that it can lead to an improvement over two baselines: (1) treating multiclass problems as multi-label by debiasing labels independently and (2) transforming the features instead of the labels. Surprisingly, we also demonstrate that independent label debiasing yields competitive results in most (but not all) settings. We validate these conclusions on synthetic and real-world datasets from social science, computer vision, and healthcare.
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