Preference vs. Parity-based Notions of Fairness

Muhammad Bilal Zafar

Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Isabel Valera, Manuel Gomez Rodriguez, Krishna P. Gummadi and Adrian Weller

Many notions of fairness in data-driven decision making are inspired by the concept of discrimination in social sciences and law, and focus on ensuring parity (equality) in treatment or outcomes for different social groups. In this paper, we propose preference-based notions of fairness with the goals of avoiding potential ‘reverse-discrimination’ and enabling high decision accuracy. We introduce tractable proxies to design convex boundary-based classifiers that satisfy these new notions of fairness and show on the ProPublica COMPAS dataset that these notions allow for greater decision accuracy than parity-based fairness.

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