Causal Fairness Analysis: A Causal Toolkit for Fair Machine Learning

Decision-making systems based on AI and machine learning have been used throughout a wide range of real-world scenarios, including healthcare, law enforcement, education, and finance. It is no longer far-fetched to envision a future where autonomous systems will drive entire business decisions and, more broadly, support large-scale decision-making infrastructure to solve society’s most challenging problems. Issues of unfairness and discrimination are pervasive when decisions are being made by humans, and remain (or are potentially amplified) when decisions are made using machines with little transparency, accountability, and fairness. In this monograph, we introduce a framework for causal fairness analysis with the intent of filling in this gap, i.e., understanding, modeling, and possibly solving issues of fairness in decision-making settings. The main insight of our approach will be to link the quantification of the disparities present in the observed data with the underlying, often unobserved, collection of causal mechanisms that generate the disparity in the first place, a challenge we call the Fundamental Problem of Causal Fairness Analysis (FPCFA). In order to solve the FPCFA, we study the problem of decomposing variations and empirical measures of fairness that attribute such variations to structural mechanisms and different units of the population. Our effort culminates in the Fairness Map, the first systematic attempt to organize and explain the relationship between various criteria found in the literature. Finally, we study which causal assumptions are minimally needed for performing causal fairness analysis and propose the Fairness Cookbook, which allows one to assess the existence of disparate impact and disparate treatment.