FiSH: Fair Spatial Hotspots

TL;DR

This paper introduces FiSH, a novel method for detecting fair and diverse spatial hot spots, addressing fairness concerns in spatial data analysis for policy interventions, with efficient computation and empirical validation.

Contribution

We formulate the task of fair spatial hot spot detection, develop evaluation metrics, and propose FiSH, an efficient heuristic method for identifying high-quality, fair, and diverse hot spots.

Findings

FiSH effectively balances fairness and diversity in hot spot detection.

The method achieves high-quality solutions with fast response times.

Empirical results demonstrate FiSH's efficiency on real-world data.

Abstract

Pervasiveness of tracking devices and enhanced availability of spatially located data has deepened interest in using them for various policy interventions, through computational data analysis tasks such as spatial hot spot detection. In this paper, we consider, for the first time to our best knowledge, fairness in detecting spatial hot spots. We motivate the need for ensuring fairness through statistical parity over the collective population covered across chosen hot spots. We then characterize the task of identifying a diverse set of solutions in the noteworthiness-fairness trade-off spectrum, to empower the user to choose a trade-off justified by the policy domain. Being a novel task formulation, we also develop a suite of evaluation metrics for fair hot spots, motivated by the need to evaluate pertinent aspects of the task. We illustrate the computational infeasibility of identifying fair hot spots using naive and/or direct approaches and devise a method, codenamed {\it FiSH}, for efficiently identifying high-quality, fair and diverse sets of spatial hot spots. FiSH traverses the tree-structured search space using heuristics that guide it towards identifying effective and fair sets of spatial hot spots. Through an extensive empirical analysis over a real-world dataset from the domain of human development, we illustrate that FiSH generates high-quality solutions at fast response times.