Making Fair Classification via Correlation Alignment

Machine learning learns patterns from data to improve the performance of the decision-making systems through computing, and gradually affects people's lives. However, it shows that in current research machine learning algorithms may reinforce human discrimination, and exacerbate negative impacts on unprivileged groups. To mitigate potential unfairness in machine learning classifiers, we propose a fair classification approach by quantifying the difference in the prediction distribution with the idea of correlation alignment in transfer learning, which improves fairness efficiently by minimizing the second-order statistical distance of the prediction distribution. We evaluate the validity of our approach on four real-world datasets. It demonstrates that our approach significantly mitigates bias w.r.t demographic parity, equality of opportunity, and equalized odds across different groups in a classification setting, and achieves better tradeoff between accuracy and fairness than previous work. In addition, our approach can further improve fairness and mitigate the fair conflict problem in debiased networks.