Cost Efficient Fairness Audit Under Partial Feedback

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03734v1
• Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2025 08:38:03 GMT
• Title: Cost Efficient Fairness Audit Under Partial Feedback
• Authors: Nirjhar Das, Mohit Sharma, Praharsh Nanavati, Kirankumar Shiragur, Amit Deshpande,
• Abstract summary: We study the problem of auditing the fairness of a given classifier under partial feedback.<n>We introduce a novel cost model for acquiring additional labeled data.<n>We show that our algorithms consistently outperform natural baselines by around 50% in terms of audit cost.
• Score: 14.57835291220813
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: We study the problem of auditing the fairness of a given classifier under partial feedback, where true labels are available only for positively classified individuals, (e.g., loan repayment outcomes are observed only for approved applicants). We introduce a novel cost model for acquiring additional labeled data, designed to more accurately reflect real-world costs such as credit assessment, loan processing, and potential defaults. Our goal is to find optimal fairness audit algorithms that are more cost-effective than random exploration and natural baselines. In our work, we consider two audit settings: a black-box model with no assumptions on the data distribution, and a mixture model, where features and true labels follow a mixture of exponential family distributions. In the black-box setting, we propose a near-optimal auditing algorithm under mild assumptions and show that a natural baseline can be strictly suboptimal. In the mixture model setting, we design a novel algorithm that achieves significantly lower audit cost than the black-box case. Our approach leverages prior work on learning from truncated samples and maximum-a-posteriori oracles, and extends known results on spherical Gaussian mixtures to handle exponential family mixtures, which may be of independent interest. Moreover, our algorithms apply to popular fairness metrics including demographic parity, equal opportunity, and equalized odds. Empirically, we demonstrate strong performance of our algorithms on real-world fair classification datasets like Adult Income and Law School, consistently outperforming natural baselines by around 50% in terms of audit cost.

Related papers

• Asymptotically Optimal Linear Best Feasible Arm Identification with Fixed Budget [55.938644481736446]
  We introduce a novel algorithm for best feasible arm identification that guarantees an exponential decay in the error probability.<n>We validate our algorithm through comprehensive empirical evaluations across various problem instances with different levels of complexity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-03T02:56:26Z)
• Alpha and Prejudice: Improving $α$-sized Worst-case Fairness via Intrinsic Reweighting [34.954141077528334]
  Worst-case fairness with off-the-shelf demographics group achieves parity by maximizing the model utility of the worst-off group. Recent advances have reframed this learning problem by introducing the lower bound of minimal partition ratio.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-05T13:04:05Z)
• Identifying and Mitigating Social Bias Knowledge in Language Models [52.52955281662332]
  We propose a novel debiasing approach, Fairness Stamp (FAST), which enables fine-grained calibration of individual social biases.<n>FAST surpasses state-of-the-art baselines with superior debiasing performance.<n>This highlights the potential of fine-grained debiasing strategies to achieve fairness in large language models.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-07T17:14:58Z)
• Fairness Without Harm: An Influence-Guided Active Sampling Approach [32.173195437797766]
  We aim to train models that mitigate group fairness disparity without causing harm to model accuracy. The current data acquisition methods, such as fair active learning approaches, typically require annotating sensitive attributes. We propose a tractable active data sampling algorithm that does not rely on training group annotations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-20T07:57:38Z)
• Fair and Optimal Classification via Post-Processing [10.163721748735801]
  This paper provides a complete characterization of the inherent tradeoff of demographic parity on classification problems. We show that the minimum error rate achievable by randomized and attribute-aware fair classifiers is given by the optimal value of a Wasserstein-barycenter problem.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-03T00:04:04Z)
• Understanding Unfairness in Fraud Detection through Model and Data Bias Interactions [4.159343412286401]
  We argue that algorithmic unfairness stems from interactions between models and biases in the data. We study a set of hypotheses regarding the fairness-accuracy trade-offs that fairness-blind ML algorithms exhibit under different data bias settings.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-07-13T15:18:30Z)
• Individually Fair Learning with One-Sided Feedback [15.713330010191092]
  We consider an online learning problem with one-sided feedback, in which the learner is able to observe the true label only for positively predicted instances. On each round, $k$ instances arrive and receive classification outcomes according to a randomized policy deployed by the learner. We then construct an efficient reduction from our problem of online learning with one-sided feedback and a panel reporting fairness violations to the contextual semi-bandit problem.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-06-09T12:59:03Z)
• Can Active Learning Preemptively Mitigate Fairness Issues? [66.84854430781097]
  dataset bias is one of the prevailing causes of unfairness in machine learning. We study whether models trained with uncertainty-based ALs are fairer in their decisions with respect to a protected class. We also explore the interaction of algorithmic fairness methods such as gradient reversal (GRAD) and BALD.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-04-14T14:20:22Z)
• Beyond Individual and Group Fairness [90.4666341812857]
  We present a new data-driven model of fairness that is guided by the unfairness complaints received by the system. Our model supports multiple fairness criteria and takes into account their potential incompatibilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-08-21T14:14:44Z)
• Towards Model-Agnostic Post-Hoc Adjustment for Balancing Ranking Fairness and Algorithm Utility [54.179859639868646]
  Bipartite ranking aims to learn a scoring function that ranks positive individuals higher than negative ones from labeled data. There have been rising concerns on whether the learned scoring function can cause systematic disparity across different protected groups. We propose a model post-processing framework for balancing them in the bipartite ranking scenario.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-06-15T10:08:39Z)
• Causal Feature Selection for Algorithmic Fairness [61.767399505764736]
  We consider fairness in the integration component of data management. We propose an approach to identify a sub-collection of features that ensure the fairness of the dataset.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-06-10T20:20:10Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.