Scientific Computing and Numerics (SCAN) Seminar

Yuekai SunStatistics, University of Michigan
Training individually fair ML systems with sensitive subspace robustness

Monday, September 9, 2019 - 1:25pm
114 Gates

We consider an approach to training machine learning systems that are fair in the sense that their performance is invariant under certain perturbations to the features. For example, the performance of a resume screening system should be invariant under changes to the name of the applicant or switching the gender pronouns. We connect this intuitive notion of algorithmic fairness to individual fairness and study how to train ML algorithms that are algorithmically fair. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two machine learning tasks that are susceptible to gender and racial biases.