Multi-Sensitive Distributional Fairness: Joint Wasserstein Audits and Shapley Allocation
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Fairness audits with several sensitive attributes are often performed one coordinate at a time. This can miss purely intersectional disparities: a score may be independent of each sensitive coordinate while depending on their joint profile. We study distributional demographic parity for a real-valued score using one-dimensional Wasserstein geometry. We distinguish two complementary constructions. Conditional and sequential audits characterize joint parity through their zero sets, but their positive values do not generally decompose a fixed joint Wasserstein disparity. By contrast, full-cell conditional quantile functions define a Hilbert-valued random variable whose variance is the joint disparity. Conditional expectations of this quantile process induce a monotone information game: every reveal order yields an exact martingale decomposition of the same joint disparity, while Shapley values provide an order-free attribution across sensitive attributes. Under independent sensitive attributes, the game reduces to a Hoeffding-ANOVA decomposition and Shapley splits each interaction energy equally among its members; under dependence, orthogonality is lost and explicit formulas reveal suppression and redundancy effects that marginal audits can hide. We give fixed-grid estimators and permutation calibration, and illustrate the framework on synthetic examples and ACSIncome. The resulting framework separates three questions that are often conflated: whether joint distributional parity holds, how a fixed joint disparity decomposes along an information path, and how that disparity can be attributed across sensitive coordinates without privileging an ordering.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 12 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.
Builds on
12 of 28 references.
References · 12
- 2021Retiring Adult: New Datasets for Fair Machine Learningcited by 449
- 2017Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairnesscited by 384
- 2018An Intersectional Definition of Fairnesscited by 127
- 2020Fair Regression with Wasserstein Barycenterscited by 100
- 2013Bounding the Estimation Error of Sampling-based Shapley Value Approximationcited by 58
- 2019Auditing and Achieving Intersectional Fairness in Classification Problemscited by 27
- 2019Fairness in Clustering with Multiple Sensitive Attributescited by 21
- 2020Wasserstein-based fairness interpretability framework for machine learning modelscited by 14
- 2021Cohort Shapley value for algorithmic fairnesscited by 13
- 2021Fairness seen as Global Sensitivity Analysiscited by 9
- 2023A Sequentially Fair Mechanism for Multiple Sensitive Attributescited by 9
- 2025Machine Learning with Multitype Protected Attributes: Intersectional Fairness through Regularisationcited by 3
Built on by
Not cited yet.