Temporal Fairness in Decision Making Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of temporal fairness in decision making, proposing three approaches to incorporate fairness over time, and evaluates their effectiveness across multiple domains.

Contribution

It presents a new temporal fairness framework and three methods to integrate it into decision-making optimization problems, extending existing fairness notions.

Findings

Temporal fairness can be effectively incorporated into decision-making.

Proposed approaches outperform baseline in multiple domains.

Temporal considerations improve fairness consistency over time.

Abstract

In this work we consider a new interpretation of fairness in decision making problems. Building upon existing fairness formulations, we focus on how to reason over fairness from a temporal perspective, taking into account the fairness of a history of past decisions. After introducing the concept of temporal fairness, we propose three approaches that incorporate temporal fairness in decision making problems formulated as optimization problems. We present a qualitative evaluation of our approach in four different domains and compare the solutions against a baseline approach that does not consider the temporal aspect of fairness.