Fair and Useful Cohort Selection

Konstantina Bairaktari, Paul Tsela Langton, Huy Nguyen, Niklas Smedemark-Margulies, Jonathan Ullman

Abstract:

A challenge in fair algorithm design is that, while there are compelling notions of individual fairness, these notions typically do not satisfy desirable composition properties, and downstream applications based on fair classifiers might not preserve fairness.
To study fairness under composition, Dwork & Ilvento (2019) introduced an archetypal problem called fair-cohort-selection problem, where a single fair classifier is composed with itself to select a group of candidates of a given size, and proposed a solution to this problem.

In this work we design algorithms for selecting cohorts that not only preserve fairness, but also maximize the utility of the selected cohort under two notions of utility that we introduce and motivate. We give optimal (or approximately optimal) polynomial-time algorithms for this problem in both an offline setting, and an online setting where candidates arrive one at a time and are classified as they arrive.

Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Novi_Quadrianto1

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Submission Number: 1002