Procedural Fairness and Its Relationship with Distributive Fairness in Machine Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to enhance procedural fairness in machine learning training, explores its relationship with distributive fairness, and demonstrates how optimizing these fairness metrics affects bias and group fairness in models.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach for procedural fairness during training and analyzes its impact on distributive fairness and dataset bias in ML models.

Findings

Procedural fairness optimization reduces decision-making biases.

Both dataset bias and procedural fairness significantly influence distributive fairness.

Optimizing distributive fairness encourages models to favor disadvantaged groups.

Abstract

Fairness in machine learning (ML) has garnered significant attention in recent years. While existing research has predominantly focused on the distributive fairness of ML models, there has been limited exploration of procedural fairness. This paper proposes a novel method to achieve procedural fairness during the model training phase. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through experiments conducted on one synthetic and six real-world datasets. Additionally, this work studies the relationship between procedural fairness and distributive fairness in ML models. On one hand, the impact of dataset bias and the procedural fairness of ML model on its distributive fairness is examined. The results highlight a significant influence of both dataset bias and procedural fairness on distributive fairness. On the other hand, the distinctions between optimizing procedural and distributive fairness metrics are analyzed. Experimental results demonstrate that optimizing procedural fairness metrics mitigates biases introduced or amplified by the decision-making process, thereby ensuring fairness in the decision-making process itself, as well as improving distributive fairness. In contrast, optimizing distributive fairness metrics encourages the ML model's decision-making process to favor disadvantaged groups, counterbalancing the inherent preferences for advantaged groups present in the dataset and ultimately achieving distributive fairness.