Debiasing Neural Networks using Differentiable Classification Parity Proxies

Abstract

Due to growing concerns about demographic disparities and discrimination resulting from algorithmic and model-based decision-making, recent research has focused on mitigating biases against already disadvantaged or marginalised groups in classification models. From the perspective of classification parity, the two commonest metrics for assessing fairness are statistical parity and equality of opportunity. Current approaches to debiasing in classification either require the knowledge of the protected attribute before or during training or are entirely agnostic to the model class and parameters. This work considers differentiable proxy functions for statistical parity and equality of opportunity and introduces two novel debiasing techniques for neural network classifiers based on fine-tuning and pruning an already-trained network. As opposed to the prior work leveraging adversarial training, the proposed methods are simple yet effective and can be readily applied post hoc. Our experimental results encouragingly suggest that these approaches successfully debias fully connected neural networks trained on tabular data and often outperform model-agnostic post-processing methods.