# CONFAIR: Configurable and Interpretable Algorithmic Fairness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08878 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08878/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Certifying and removing disparate impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3756/) (2014)
- [On Fairness and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02012/) (2017)
- [All Models are Wrong, but Many are Useful: Learning a Variable's Importance by Studying an Entire Class of Prediction Models Simultaneously](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01489/) (2018)
- [Fairness Beyond Disparate Treatment & Disparate Impact: Learning Classification without Disparate Mistreatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08452/) (2016)
- [Gradient-based Hyperparameter Optimization through Reversible Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03492/) (2015)
- [Forward and Reverse Gradient-Based Hyperparameter Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01785/) (2017)
- [Empirical Risk Minimization under Fairness Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08626/) (2018)
- [Fair Clustering Through Fairlets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05733/) (2018)
- [Algorithmic Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09784/) (2020)
- [Automated Experiments on Ad Privacy Settings: A Tale of Opacity, Choice, and Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.6491/) (2014)
- [Clustering without Over-Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12753/) (2019)
- [On the relation between accuracy and fairness in binary classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05723/) (2015)
- [Fair Hierarchical Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10221/) (2020)
- [Decoupled classifiers for fair and efficient machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06613/) (2017)
- [AML-SVM: Adaptive Multilevel Learning with Support Vector Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02592/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid growth of data in the recent years has led to the development of complex learning algorithms that are often used to make decisions in real world. While the positive impact of the algorithms has been tremendous, there is a need to mitigate any bias arising from either training samples or implicit assumptions made about the data samples. This need becomes critical when algorithms are used in automated decision making systems that can hugely impact people's lives. Many approaches have been proposed to make learning algorithms fair by detecting and mitigating bias in different stages of optimization. However, due to a lack of a universal definition of fairness, these algorithms optimize for a particular interpretation of fairness which makes them limited for real world use. Moreover, an underlying assumption that is common to all algorithms is the apparent equivalence of achieving fairness and removing bias. In other words, there is no user defined criteria that can be incorporated into the optimization procedure for producing a fair algorithm. Motivated by these shortcomings of existing methods, we propose the CONFAIR procedure that produces a fair algorithm by incorporating user constraints into the optimization procedure. Furthermore, we make the process interpretable by estimating the most predictive features from data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on several real world datasets using different fairness criteria.