Towards Fair Machine Learning Software: Understanding and Addressing Model Bias Through Counterfactual Thinking

Understand

The increasing use of Machine Learning (ML) software can lead to unfair and unethical decisions, thus fairness bugs in software are becoming a growing concern.

• Addressing these fairness bugs often involves sacrificing ML performance, such as accuracy.
• To address this issue, we present a novel counterfactual approach that uses counterfactual thinking to tackle the root causes of bias in ML software.
• In addition, our approach combines models optimized for both performance and fairness, resulting in an optimal solution in both aspects.