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An Operational Perspective to Fairness Interventions: Where and How to Intervene

As AI-based decision systems proliferate, their successful operationalization requires balancing multiple desiderata: predictive performance, disparity across groups, safeguarding sensitive group attributes (e.g., race), and engineering cost. We present a holistic framework for evaluating and contextualizing fairness interventions with respect to the above desiderata. The two key points of practical consideration are \emph{where} (pre-, in-, post-processing) and \emph{how} (in what way the sensitive group data is used) the intervention is introduced. We demonstrate our framework with a case study on predictive parity. In it, we first propose a novel method for achieving predictive parity fairness without using group data at inference time via distibutionally robust optimization. Then, we showcase the effectiveness of these methods in a benchmarking study of close to 400 variations across two major model types (XGBoost vs. Neural Net), ten datasets, and over twenty unique methodologies. Methodological insights derived from our empirical study inform the practical design of ML workflow with fairness as a central concern. We find predictive parity is difficult to achieve without using group data, and despite requiring group data during model training (but not inference), distributionally robust methods we develop provide significant Pareto improvement. Moreover, a plain XGBoost model often Pareto-dominates neural networks with fairness interventions, highlighting the importance of model inductive bias.

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