Fairness-Aware Unsupervised Feature Selection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fairness-aware unsupervised feature selection framework that minimizes bias related to protected attributes while preserving data information, offering a model-agnostic debiasing approach prior to downstream learning.

Contribution

It proposes a novel kernel alignment-based framework for fairness-aware unsupervised feature selection, addressing bias without relying on in-processing methods.

Findings

Achieves a good balance between utility and fairness on real-world datasets.

Effectively reduces correlation with protected attributes.

Outperforms existing methods in fairness promotion.

Abstract

Feature selection is a prevalent data preprocessing paradigm for various learning tasks. Due to the expensive cost of acquiring supervision information, unsupervised feature selection sparks great interests recently. However, existing unsupervised feature selection algorithms do not have fairness considerations and suffer from a high risk of amplifying discrimination by selecting features that are over associated with protected attributes such as gender, race, and ethnicity. In this paper, we make an initial investigation of the fairness-aware unsupervised feature selection problem and develop a principled framework, which leverages kernel alignment to find a subset of high-quality features that can best preserve the information in the original feature space while being minimally correlated with protected attributes. Specifically, different from the mainstream in-processing debiasing methods, our proposed framework can be regarded as a model-agnostic debiasing strategy that eliminates biases and discrimination before downstream learning algorithms are involved. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves a good trade-off between utility maximization and fairness promotion.