When causality meets fairness: A survey

Abstract

Addressing the problem of fairness is crucial to safely using machine learning algorithms to support decisions that have a critical impact on people's lives, such as job hiring, child maltreatment, disease diagnosis, loan granting, etc. Several notions of fairness have been defined and examined in the past decade, such as statistical parity and equalized odds. However, the most recent notions of fairness are causal-based and reflect the now widely accepted idea that using causality is necessary to appropriately address the problem of fairness. This paper examines an exhaustive list of causal-based fairness notions and studies their applicability in real-world scenarios. As most causal-based fairness notions are defined in terms of non-observable quantities (e.g., interventions and counterfactuals), their deployment in practice requires computing or estimating those quantities using observational data. This paper offers a comprehensive report of the different approaches to infer causal quantities from observational data, including identifiability (Pearl's SCM framework) and estimation (potential outcome framework). The main contributions of this survey paper are (1) a guideline to help select a suitable causal fairness notion given a specific real-world scenario and (2) a ranking of the fairness notions according to Pearl's causation ladder, indicating how difficult it is to deploy each notion in practice.