Formal Group Fairness and Accuracy in Automated Decision Making

Abstract

Most research on fairness in Machine Learning assumes the relationship between fairness and accuracy to be a trade-off, with an increase in fairness leading to an unavoidable loss of accuracy. In this study, several approaches for fair Machine Learning are studied to experimentally analyze the relationship between accuracy and group fairness. The results indicated that group fairness and accuracy may even benefit each other, which emphasizes the importance of selecting appropriate measures for performance evaluation. This work provides a foundation for further studies on the adequate objectives of Machine Learning in the context of fair automated decision making.