Considerable research effort has been guided towards algorithmic fairness but
real-world adoption of bias reduction techniques is still scarce. Existing
methods are either metric- or model-specific, require access to sensitive
attributes at inference time, or carry high development or deployment costs.
This work explores the unfairness that emerges when optimizing ML models solely
for predictive performance, and how to mitigate it with a simple and easily
deployed intervention: fairness-aware hyperparameter optimization (HO). We
propose and evaluate fairness-aware variants of three popular HO algorithms:
Fair Random Search, Fair TPE, and Fairband. We validate our approach on a
real-world bank account opening fraud case-study, as well as on three datasets
from the fairness literature. Results show that, without extra training cost,
it is feasible to find models with 111% mean fairness increase and just 6%
decrease in performance when compared with fairness-blind HO.

本文探讨了为了预测性能而优化机器学习模型时出现的不公平现象，以及如何通过公平感知的超参数优化来减轻这种不公平现象。我们提出并评估了三种受欢迎的公平感知的超参数优化算法的变种：Fair Random Search、Fair TPE 和 Fairband，并在实际案例研究和公平性文献中的三个数据集上验证了我们的方法，结果表明，无需额外的训练成本，可以找到 111% 平均公平性增加和仅 6% 性能下降的模型。