FAIRM: Learning invariant representations for algorithmic fairness and
  domain generalization with minimax optimality
Sai Li Linjun Zhang
Machine learning methods often assume that the test data have the same
distribution as the training data. However, this assumption may not hold due to
multiple levels of heterogeneity in applications, raising issues in algorithmic
fairness and domain generalization. In this work, we address the problem of
fair and generalizable machine learning by invariant principles. We propose a
training environment-based oracle, FAIRM, which has desirable fairness and
domain generalization properties under a diversity-type condition. We then
provide an empirical FAIRM with finite-sample theoretical guarantees under weak
distributional assumptions. We then develop efficient algorithms to realize
FAIRM in linear models and demonstrate the nonasymptotic performance with
minimax optimality. We evaluate our method in numerical experiments with
synthetic data and MNIST data and show that it outperforms its counterparts.