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Fairness in Unsupervised Learning

Published: 19 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Data in digital form is expanding at an exponential rate, far outpacing any chance of getting any significant fraction labelled manually. This has resulted in heightened research emphasis on unsupervised learning, learning in the absence of labels. In fact, unsupervised learning has been often dubbed as the next frontier of AI. Unsupervised learning is the most plausible model to analyze the bulk of passively collected data that spans across various domains; e.g., social media footprints, safety/surveilance cameras, IoT devices, sensors, smartphone apps, medical wearables, traffic sensing devices and public wi-fi access. While fairness in supervised learning, such as classification tasks, has inspired a large amount of research in the past few years, work on fair unsupervised learning has been relatively slow in picking up. This tutorial targets to provide an overview of: (i) fairness issues in unsupervised learning drawing abundantly from political philosophy, (ii) current research in fair unsupervised learning, and (iii) new directions to extend the state-of-the-art in fair unsupervised learning. While we intend to broadly cover all tasks in unsupervised learning, our focus will be on clustering, retrieval and representation learning. In a unique departure from conventional data science tutorials, we will place significant emphasis on presenting and debating pertinent literature from ethics and philosophy. Overall, this half-day tutorial brings a strong emphasis on ensuring strong interdisciplinarity.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (3340531.3412175.mp4)
Teaser for the Tutorial on Fairness in Unsupervised Learning

References

[1]
Savitha Sam Abraham, Deepak P, and Sowmya S. Sundaram. 2020. Fairness in Clustering with Multiple Sensitive Attributes. In EDBT. 287--298.
[2]
Asia J Biega, Krishna P Gummadi, and Gerhard Weikum. 2018. Equity of attention: Amortizing individual fairness in rankings. In 41st ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018). 405--414.
[3]
Alexandra Chouldechova and Aaron Roth. 2020. A snapshot of the frontiers of fairness in machine learning. Commun. ACM, Vol. 63, 5 (2020), 82--89.
[4]
Ian Davidson and SS Ravi. 2020. A Framework for Determining the Fairness of Outlier Detection. ECAI (2020).
[5]
Cynthia Dwork, Moritz Hardt, Toniann Pitassi, Omer Reingold, and Richard Zemel. 2012. Fairness through awareness. In Proceedings of the 3rd innovations in theoretical computer science conference. 214--226.
[6]
Juhi Kulshrestha, Motahhare Eslami, Johnnatan Messias, Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Saptarshi Ghosh, Krishna P Gummadi, and Karrie Karahalios. 2017. Quantifying search bias: Investigating sources of bias for political searches in social media. In ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
[7]
Deepak P. 2020 a. Local Connectivity in Centroid Clustering. In 24th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2020).
[8]
Deepak P. 2020 b. Whither Fair Clustering?. In AI For Social Good Workshop (AI4SG).
[9]
Deepak P and Savitha Sam Abraham. 2020 a. Fair Outlier Detection. In 21st International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2020).
[10]
Deepak P and Savitha Sam Abraham. 2020 b. Representativity Fairness in Clustering. In 12th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2020).
[11]
John Rawls. 2001. Justice as fairness: A restatement. Harvard University Press.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CIKM '20: Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management
October 2020
3619 pages
ISBN:9781450368599
DOI:10.1145/3340531
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 19 October 2020

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  1. fairness
  2. machine learning
  3. unsupervised learning

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