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Empirical observation of negligible fairness–accuracy trade-offs in machine learning for public policy

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 896–904 (2021)Cite this article

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A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv.

Abstract

The growing use of machine learning in policy and social impact settings has raised concerns over fairness implications, especially for racial minorities. These concerns have generated considerable interest among machine learning and artificial intelligence researchers, who have developed new methods and established theoretical bounds for improving fairness, focusing on the source data, regularization and model training, or post-hoc adjustments to model scores. However, few studies have examined the practical trade-offs between fairness and accuracy in real-world settings to understand how these bounds and methods translate into policy choices and impact on society. Our empirical study fills this gap by investigating the impact of mitigating disparities on accuracy, focusing on the common context of using machine learning to inform benefit allocation in resource-constrained programmes across education, mental health, criminal justice and housing safety. Here we describe applied work in which we find fairness–accuracy trade-offs to be negligible in practice. In each setting studied, explicitly focusing on achieving equity and using our proposed post-hoc disparity mitigation methods, fairness was substantially improved without sacrificing accuracy. This observation was robust across policy contexts studied, scale of resources available for intervention, time and the relative size of the protected groups. These empirical results challenge a commonly held assumption that reducing disparities requires either accepting an appreciable drop in accuracy or the development of novel, complex methods, making reducing disparities in these applications more practical.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of the methods used and motivating results.
Fig. 2: Comparing equity and performance metrics for different model selection strategies between policy contexts.
Fig. 3: Comparing disparity and performance metrics over time for different model selection strategies in the inmate mental health policy setting.
Fig. 4: Comparing disparity and performance metrics across programme scale and protected group size in the inmate mental health policy setting.

Data availability

Data from the inmate mental health context were shared through a partnership and data use agreement with the county government of Johnson County, KS (which collected and made available data from the county- and city-level agencies in their jurisdiction as described in the Methods). Data from the housing safety context were shared through a partnership and data use agreement with the Code Enforcement Division in the city of San Jose, CA. Data from the student outcomes setting were shared through a partnership and data use agreement with the Ministry of Education in El Salvador. Although the sensitive nature of the data for these three contexts required that the work was performed under strict data use agreements and the data cannot be made publicly available, researchers or practitioners interested in collaborating on these projects or with the agencies involved should contact the corresponding author for more information and introductions. The education crowdfunding dataset is publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/c/kdd-cup-2014-predicting-excitement-at-donors-choose/data. A database extract with model outputs and disparity mitigation results using this dataset is available for download (see replication instructions in the GitHub repository linked in the code availability statement).

Code availability

The code used here for modelling, disparity mitigation and analysis for all four projects is available at https://github.com/dssg/peeps-chili (ref. 44). Complete instructions for replication of the education crowdfunding results reported here can be found in the README of this respository, along with a step-by-step jupyter notebook for performing the analysis.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship fellows, project partners and funders, as well as our colleagues at the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at University of Chicago for the initial work on projects that were extended and used in this study. We also thank K. Amarasinghe for helpful discussions on the study and drafts of this paper. Parts of this work were funded by the National Science Foundation under grant number IIS-2040929 (to K.T.R. and R.G.) and by a grant (unnumbered) from the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (to K.T.R., H.L. and R.G.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Machine Learning Department and Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Kit T. Rodolfa, Hemank Lamba & Rayid Ghani

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  1. Kit T. Rodolfa
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  2. Hemank Lamba
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Contributions

K.T.R. And R.G. conceptualized the study. K.T.R. designed the methodology, contributed to the software and investigation and wrote the original draft. H.L. contributed to the software and investigation, and reviewed and edited the manuscript. R.G. supervised the study, acquired funding and edited and reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rayid Ghani.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Nikhil Garg, Kristian Kersting and Allison Koenecke for their contribution to to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Discussion, Figs. 1–7 and Tables 1–4.

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Rodolfa, K.T., Lamba, H. & Ghani, R. Empirical observation of negligible fairness–accuracy trade-offs in machine learning for public policy. Nat Mach Intell 3, 896–904 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00396-x

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