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Data preprocessing techniques for classification without discrimination

Knowledge and Information Systems volume 33, pages 1–33 (2012)Cite this article

Abstract

Recently, the following Discrimination-Aware Classification Problem was introduced: Suppose we are given training data that exhibit unlawful discrimination; e.g., toward sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity. The task is to learn a classifier that optimizes accuracy, but does not have this discrimination in its predictions on test data. This problem is relevant in many settings, such as when the data are generated by a biased decision process or when the sensitive attribute serves as a proxy for unobserved features. In this paper, we concentrate on the case with only one binary sensitive attribute and a two-class classification problem. We first study the theoretically optimal trade-off between accuracy and non-discrimination for pure classifiers. Then, we look at algorithmic solutions that preprocess the data to remove discrimination before a classifier is learned. We survey and extend our existing data preprocessing techniques, being suppression of the sensitive attribute, massaging the dataset by changing class labels, and reweighing or resampling the data to remove discrimination without relabeling instances. These preprocessing techniques have been implemented in a modified version of Weka and we present the results of experiments on real-life data.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and the many suggestions that contributed substantially to the improvement of the document.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HG 7.46, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Faisal Kamiran

  2. HG 7.82a, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Toon Calders

Authors
  1. Faisal Kamiran
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  2. Toon Calders
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Faisal Kamiran.

Additional information

This paper is an extended version of the papers [3, 13, 14].

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Kamiran, F., Calders, T. Data preprocessing techniques for classification without discrimination. Knowl Inf Syst 33, 1–33 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-011-0463-8

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Keywords

  • Classification
  • Preprocessing
  • Discrimination-aware data mining