Bias In, Bias Out? Evaluating the Folk Wisdom
We evaluate the folk wisdom that algorithmic decision rules trained on data produced by biased human decision-makers necessarily reflect this bias. We consider a setting where training labels are only generated if a biased decision-maker takes a particular action, and so "biased" training data arise due to discriminatory selection into the training data. In our baseline model, the more biased the decision-maker is against a group, the more the algorithmic decision rule favors that group. We refer to this phenomenon as "bias reversal." We then clarify the conditions that give rise to bias reversal. Whether a prediction algorithm reverses or inherits bias depends critically on how the decision-maker affects the training data as well as the label used in training. We illustrate our main theoretical results in a simulation study applied to the New York City Stop, Question and Frisk dataset.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The Wisdom of the Few? "Supertaggers" in Collaborative Tagging Systems
A folksonomy is ostensibly an information structure built up by the "wisdom of the crowd", but is the "crowd" really doing the work? Tagging is in fact a sharply skewed process in which a small minority of "supertagger" …
TAGWhen can we get away with using the two-way fixed effects regression?
The use of the two-way fixed effects regression in empirical social science was historically motivated by folk wisdom that it uncovers the Average Treatment effect on the Treated (ATT) as in the canonical two-period two-…
EconometricsNavigateregressionThe Wisdom of Partisan Crowds: Comparing Collective Intelligence in Humans and LLM-based Agents
Human groups are able to converge on more accurate beliefs through deliberation, even in the presence of polarization and partisan bias -- a phenomenon known as the "wisdom of partisan crowds." Generated agents powered b…
Wisdom from Diversity: Bias Mitigation Through Hybrid Human-LLM Crowds
Despite their performance, large language models (LLMs) can inadvertently perpetuate biases found in the data they are trained on. By analyzing LLM responses to bias-eliciting headlines, we find that these models often m…
DiversityUnlocking Fairness: a Trade-off Revisited
The prevailing wisdom is that a model's fairness and its accuracy are in tension with one another. However, there is a pernicious {\em modeling-evaluating dualism} bedeviling fair machine learning in which phenome…
FairnessSelection bias