MAAT: a novel ensemble approach to addressing fairness and performance bugs for machine learning software

Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) software can lead to unfair and unethical decisions, making software fairness bugs an increasingly significant concern for software engineers. However, addressing fairness bugs often comes at the cost of introducing more ML performance (e.g., accuracy) bugs. In this paper, we propose MAAT, a novel ensemble approach to improving fairness-performance trade-off for ML software. Conventional ensemble methods combine different models with identical learning objectives. MAAT, instead, combines models optimized for different objectives: fairness and ML performance. We conduct an extensive evaluation of MAAT with 5 state-of-the-art methods, 9 software decision tasks, and 15 fairness-performance measurements. The results show that MAAT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. In particular, MAAT beats the trade-off baseline constructed by a recent benchmarking tool in 92.2% of the overall cases evaluated, 12.2 percentage points more than the best technique currently available. Moreover, the superiority of MAAT over the state-of-the-art holds on all the tasks and measurements that we study. We have made publicly available the code and data of this work to allow for future replication and extension.