Identifiability of Causal-based ML Fairness Notions

Abstract

Machine learning algorithms can produce biased outcome/prediction, typically, against minorities and under-represented sub-populations. Therefore, fairness is emerging as an important requirement for the safe application of machine learning based technologies. The most commonly used fairness notions (e.g. statistical parity, equalized odds, predictive parity, etc.) are observational and rely on mere correlation between variables. These notions fail to identify bias in case of statistical anomalies such as Simpson's or Berkson's paradoxes. Causality-based fairness notions (e.g. counterfactual fairness, no-proxy discrimination, etc.) are immune to such anomalies and hence more reliable to assess fairness. The problem of causality-based fairness notions, however, is that they are defined in terms of quantities (e.g. causal, counterfactual, and path-specific effects) that are not always measurable. This is known as the identifiability problem and is the topic of a large body of work in the causal inference literature. The first contribution of this paper is a compilation of the major identifiability results which are of particular relevance for machine learning fairness. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work in the field of ML fairness or causal inference provides such systemization of knowledge. The second contribution is more general and addresses the main problem of using causality in machine learning, that is, how to extract causal knowledge from observational data in real scenarios. This paper shows how this can be achieved using identifiability.