• Corpus ID: 13028203

The cost of fairness in classification

@article{Menon2017TheCO,
  title={The cost of fairness in classification},
  author={Aditya Krishna Menon and Robert C. Williamson},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2017},
  volume={abs/1705.09055}
}
We study the problem of learning classifiers with a fairness constraint, with three main contributions towards the goal of quantifying the problem's inherent tradeoffs. First, we relate two existing fairness measures to cost-sensitive risks. Second, we show that for cost-sensitive classification and fairness measures, the optimal classifier is an instance-dependent thresholding of the class-probability function. Third, we show how the tradeoff between accuracy and fairness is determined by the… 
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