Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

9-2023

Abstract

Discrimination has been shown in many machine learning applications, which calls for sufficient fairness testing before their deployment in ethic-relevant domains. One widely concerning type of discrimination, testing against group discrimination, mostly hidden, is much less studied, compared with identifying individual discrimination. In this work, we propose TestSGD, an interpretable testing approach which systematically identifies and measures hidden (which we call ‘subtle’) group discrimination of a neural network characterized by conditions over combinations of the sensitive attributes. Specifically, given a neural network, TestSGD first automatically generates an interpretable rule set which categorizes the input space into two groups. Alongside, TestSGD also provides an estimated group discrimination score based on sampling the input space to measure the degree of the identified subtle group discrimination, which is guaranteed to be accurate up to an error bound. We evaluate TestSGD on multiple neural network models trained on popular datasets including both structured data and text data. The experiment results show that TestSGD is effective and efficient in identifying and measuring such subtle group discrimination that has never been revealed before. Furthermore, we show that the testing results of TestSGD can be used to mitigate such discrimination through retraining with negligible accuracy drop.

Keywords

Fairness Improvement, Fairness, Fairness Testing, Machine Learning

Discipline

Information Security | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Volume

32

Issue

6

First Page

1

Last Page

24

ISSN

1049-331X

Identifier

10.1145/3591869

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3591869

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