# Spectral Algorithms for Computing Fair Support Vector Machines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05895 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05895/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Bias Mitigation for Machine Learning Classifiers: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07068/) (2022)
- [Label-Imbalanced and Group-Sensitive Classification under Overparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01550/) (2021)
- [Understanding and Mitigating Annotation Bias in Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08504/) (2021)
- [Learning Optimal Prescriptive Trees from Observational Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13628/) (2021)
- [Fairness through Social Welfare Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00311/) (2021)
- [Fair Mixed Effects Support Vector Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06433/) (2024)
- [Fair and Accurate Regression: Strong Formulations and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17116/) (2024)
- [Fair Generalized Linear Mixed Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09273/) (2024)
- [Extending Fair Null-Space Projections for Continuous Attributes to Kernel Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03304/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Classifiers and rating scores are prone to implicitly codifying biases, which may be present in the training data, against protected classes (i.e., age, gender, or race). So it is important to understand how to design classifiers and scores that prevent discrimination in predictions. This paper develops computationally tractable algorithms for designing accurate but fair support vector machines (SVM's). Our approach imposes a constraint on the covariance matrices conditioned on each protected class, which leads to a nonconvex quadratic constraint in the SVM formulation. We develop iterative algorithms to compute fair linear and kernel SVM's, which solve a sequence of relaxations constructed using a spectral decomposition of the nonconvex constraint. Its effectiveness in achieving high prediction accuracy while ensuring fairness is shown through numerical experiments on several data sets.