Fair Classification and Social Welfare

Understand

Now that machine learning algorithms lie at the center of many resource allocation pipelines, computer scientists have been unwittingly cast as partial social planners.

• Given this state of affairs, important questions follow.
• What is the relationship between fairness as defined by computer scientists and notions of social welfare? In this paper, we present a welfare-based analysis of classification and fairness regimes.
• We translate a loss minimization program into a social welfare maximization problem with a set of implied welfare weights on individuals and groups--weights that can be analyzed from a distribution justice lens.