# Fairness Improvement with Multiple Protected Attributes: How Far Are We?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01923/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Certifying and removing disparate impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3756/) (2014)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [On Fairness and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02012/) (2017)
- [Algorithmic decision making and the cost of fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08230/) (2017)
- [Fairness in Criminal Justice Risk Assessments: The State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09207/) (2017)
- [Machine Learning Testing: Survey, Landscapes and Horizons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10742/) (2019)
- [An Intersectional Definition of Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08362/) (2018)
- [Bias in Machine Learning Software: Why? How? What to do?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12195/) (2021)
- [Fairness Testing: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10223/) (2022)
- [Do the Machine Learning Models on a Crowd Sourced Platform Exhibit Bias? An Empirical Study on Model Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12379/) (2020)
- [Fair Preprocessing: Towards Understanding Compositional Fairness of Data Transformers in Machine Learning Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06054/) (2021)
- [Characterizing Intersectional Group Fairness with Worst-Case Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01673/) (2021)
- [NeuronFair: Interpretable White-Box Fairness Testing through Biased Neuron Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13214/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Empirical Study of Bias Mitigation Methods for Machine Learning Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03277/) (2022)
- [Fairify: Fairness Verification of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06140/) (2022)
- [FairMask: Better Fairness via Model-based Rebalancing of Protected Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01109/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Fairness Improvement Based on Causality Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07190/) (2022)
- [Towards Understanding Fairness and its Composition in Ensemble Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04593/) (2022)
- [TESTSGD: Interpretable Testing of Neural Networks Against Subtle Group Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11321/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing research mostly improves the fairness of Machine Learning (ML) software regarding a single protected attribute at a time, but this is unrealistic given that many users have multiple protected attributes. This paper conducts an extensive study of fairness improvement regarding multiple protected attributes, covering 11 state-of-the-art fairness improvement methods. We analyze the effectiveness of these methods with different datasets, metrics, and ML models when considering multiple protected attributes. The results reveal that improving fairness for a single protected attribute can largely decrease fairness regarding unconsidered protected attributes. This decrease is observed in up to 88.3% of scenarios (57.5% on average). More surprisingly, we find little difference in accuracy loss when considering single and multiple protected attributes, indicating that accuracy can be maintained in the multiple-attribute paradigm. However, the effect on F1-score when handling two protected attributes is about twice that of a single attribute. This has important implications for future fairness research: reporting only accuracy as the ML performance metric, which is currently common in the literature, is inadequate.