Fair supervised learning algorithms assigning labels with little dependence on a sensitive attribute have attracted great attention in the machine learning community. While the demographic parity (DP) notion has been frequently used to measure a model's fairness in training fair classifiers, several studies in the literature suggest potential impacts of enforcing DP in fair learning algorithms. In this work, we analytically study the effect of standard DP-based regularization methods on the conditional distribution of the predicted label given the sensitive attribute. Our analysis shows that an imbalanced training dataset with a non-uniform distribution of the sensitive attribute could lead to a classification rule biased toward the sensitive attribute outcome holding the majority of training data. To control such inductive biases in DP-based fair learning, we propose a sensitive attribute-based distributionally robust optimization (SA-DRO) method improving robustness against the marginal distribution of the sensitive attribute. Finally, we present several numerical results on the application of DP-based learning methods to standard centralized and distributed learning problems. The empirical findings support our theoretical results on the inductive biases in DP-based fair learning algorithms and the debiasing effects of the proposed SA-DRO method.

研究通过敏感属性的少量依赖分配标签的公平监督学习算法在机器学习界引起了极大关注. 本文分析了标准的基于DP的正则化方法对给定敏感属性的预测标签的条件分布的影响，并提出了一种基于敏感属性的分布鲁棒优化方法以改善对敏感属性边际分布的鲁棒性，数值实验结果支持了理论结果及所提出的方法的去偏效果。

基于人口平衡的公平学习算法的归纳偏差