We will convene for the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) tomorrow on Wednesday (2/13).
The speaker is Ilya Shpitser (Johns Hopkins Computer Science) who will be presenting his work "Fair Inference on Outcomes."
Where: CGIS Knafel Building, Room K354 (see
this link for directions).
When: Wednesday, February 13th at 12 noon - 1:30 pm.
Abstract: Systematic discriminatory biases present in
our society influence the way data is collected and stored, the way
variables are defined, and the way scientific findings are put into
practice as policy. Automated decision procedures and learning
algorithms
applied to such data may serve to perpetuate existing
injustice or unfairness in our society. We consider how to solve
prediction and policy learning problems in a way which
breaks
the cycle of injustice'' by correcting for the unfair dependence of
outcomes, decisions, or both, on sensitive features (e.g., variables
that correspond to gender, race, disability, or other protected
attributes). We use methods from causal inference and constrained
optimization to learn outcome predictors and optimal policies in a way
that addresses multiple potential biases which afflict data analysis in
sensitive contexts. Our proposal comes equipped with the guarantee that
solving prediction or decision problems on new instances will result in
a joint distribution where the given fairness constraint is satisfied.
We illustrate our approach with both synthetic data and real criminal
justice data.