Programming Fairness in Algorithms

“Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.”  ―  Victor Hugo
“We need to defend the interests of those whom we’ve never met and never will.”  ―  Jeffrey D. Sachs

Note:  This article is intended for a general audience to try and elucidate the complicated nature of unfairness in machine learning algorithms. As such, I have tried to explain concepts in an accessible way with minimal use of mathematics, in the hope that everyone can get something out of reading this.
Supervised machine learning algorithms are inherently discriminatory. They are discriminatory in the sense that they use information embedded in the features of data to separate instances into distinct categories — indeed, this is their designated purpose in life. This is reflected in the name for these algorithms which are often referred to as discriminative algorithms (splitting data into categories), in contrast to generative algorithms (generating data from a given category). When we use supervised machine learning, this “discrimination” is used as an aid to help us categorize our data into distinct categories within the data distribution, as illustrated below.
 

Illustration of discriminative vs. generative algorithms. Notice that generative algorithms draw data from a probability distribution constrained to a specific category (for example, the blue distribution), whereas discriminative algorithms aim to discern the optimal boundary between these distributions. Source: Stack Overflow

 
Whilst this occurs when we apply discriminative algorithms — such as support vector machines, forms of parametric regression (e.g. vanilla linear regression), and non-parametric regression (e.g. random forest, neural networks, boosting) — to any dataset, the outcomes may not necessarily have any moral implications. For example, using last week’s weather data to try and predict the weather tomorrow has no moral valence attached to it. However, when our dataset is based on information that describes people — individuals, either directly or indirectly, this can inadvertently result in discrimination on the basis of group affiliation.
Clearly then, supervised learning is a dual-use technology. It can be used to our benefits, such as for information (e.g. predicting the weather) and protection (e.g. analyzing computer networks to detect attacks and malware). On the other hand, it has the potential to be weaponized to discriminate at essentially any level. This is not to say that the algorithms are evil for doing this, they are merely learning the representations present in the data, which may themselves have embedded within them the manifestations of historical injustices, as well as individual biases and proclivities. A common adage in data science is “garbage in = garbage out” to refer to models being highly dependent on the quality of the data supplied to them. This can be stated analogously in...