Fair Off-Policy Learning from Observational Data
Algorithmic decision-making in practice must be fair for legal, ethical, and societal reasons. To achieve this, prior research has contributed various approaches that ensure fairness in machine learning predictions, while comparatively little effort has focused on fairness in decision-making, specifically off-policy learning. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for fair off-policy learning: we learn decision rules from observational data under different notions of fairness, where we explicitly assume that observational data were collected under a different potentially discriminatory behavioral policy. For this, we first formalize different fairness notions for off-policy learning. We then propose a neural network-based framework to learn optimal policies under different fairness notions. We further provide theoretical guarantees in the form of generalization bounds for the finite-sample version of our framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through extensive numerical experiments using both simulated and real-world data. Altogether, our work enables algorithmic decision-making in a wide array of practical applications where fairness must be ensured.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Decision MakingFairnessGeneralization BoundsSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Policy Learning with Observational Data
In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constrain…
FairnessFormPositivity-free Policy Learning with Observational Data
Policy learning utilizing observational data is pivotal across various domains, with the objective of learning the optimal treatment assignment policy while adhering to specific constraints such as fairness, budget, and …
FairnessMore Efficient Policy Learning via Optimal Retargeting
Policy learning can be used to extract individualized treatment regimes from observational data in healthcare, civics, e-commerce, and beyond. One big hurdle to policy learning is a commonplace lack of overlap in the dat…
Learning Fair Policies for Multi-stage Selection Problems from Observational Data
We consider the problem of learning fair policies for multi-stage selection problems from observational data. This problem arises in several high-stakes domains such as company hiring, loan approval, or bail decisions wh…
Causal InferenceFairnessFairGBM: Gradient Boosting with Fairness Constraints
Tabular data is prevalent in many high-stakes domains, such as financial services or public policy. Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) are popular in these settings due to their scalability, performance, and low trai…
Decision MakingFairness