# FairSight: Visual Analytics for Fairness in Decision Making

## TL;DR

FairSight is a visual analytics system designed to help understand, diagnose, and mitigate biases in data-driven decision making to promote fairness, demonstrated through case and user studies.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel visual analytic tool that operationalizes fairness notions in decision pipelines, bridging the gap between fairness algorithms and real-world practice.

## Key findings

- Effective in diagnosing biases in decision processes
- Helps achieve fairer outcomes in case studies
- User study confirms usability and utility

## Abstract

Data-driven decision making related to individuals has become increasingly pervasive, but the issue concerning the potential discrimination has been raised by recent studies. In response, researchers have made efforts to propose and implement fairness measures and algorithms, but those efforts have not been translated to the real-world practice of data-driven decision making. As such, there is still an urgent need to create a viable tool to facilitate fair decision making. We propose FairSight, a visual analytic system to address this need; it is designed to achieve different notions of fairness in ranking decisions through identifying the required actions -- understanding, measuring, diagnosing and mitigating biases -- that together lead to fairer decision making. Through a case study and user study, we demonstrate that the proposed visual analytic and diagnostic modules in the system are effective in understanding the fairness-aware decision pipeline and obtaining more fair outcomes.