RAGUEL: Recourse-Aware Group Unfairness Elimination
Aparajita Haldar, Teddy Cunningham, Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu

TL;DR
RAGUEL introduces a ranking reordering method that reduces group unfairness and recourse cost imbalance in decision-making systems, ensuring fairer outcomes without significant efficiency loss.
Contribution
The paper proposes a novel recourse-aware ranking approach that enforces group fairness constraints and minimizes attribute modification costs, addressing limitations of existing unfairness mitigation methods.
Findings
RAGUEL significantly improves recourse fairness over existing methods.
The approach effectively balances fairness and modification costs.
It remains efficient for large-scale datasets.
Abstract
While machine learning and ranking-based systems are in widespread use for sensitive decision-making processes (e.g., determining job candidates, assigning credit scores), they are rife with concerns over unintended biases in their outcomes, which makes algorithmic fairness (e.g., demographic parity, equal opportunity) an objective of interest. 'Algorithmic recourse' offers feasible recovery actions to change unwanted outcomes through the modification of attributes. We introduce the notion of ranked group-level recourse fairness, and develop a 'recourse-aware ranking' solution that satisfies ranked recourse fairness constraints while minimizing the cost of suggested modifications. Our solution suggests interventions that can reorder the ranked list of database records and mitigate group-level unfairness; specifically, disproportionate representation of sub-groups and recourse cost…
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