On The Impact of Machine Learning Randomness on Group Fairness
Prakhar Ganesh Hongyan Chang Martin Strobel Reza Shokri
Statistical measures for group fairness in machine learning reflect the gap
in performance of algorithms across different groups. These measures, however,
exhibit a high variance between different training instances, which makes them
unreliable for empirical evaluation of fairness. What causes this high
variance? We investigate the impact on group fairness of different sources of
randomness in training neural networks. We show that the variance in group
fairness measures is rooted in the high volatility of the learning process on
under-represented groups. Further, we recognize the dominant source of
randomness as the stochasticity of data order during training. Based on these
findings, we show how one can control group-level accuracy (i.e., model
fairness), with high efficiency and negligible impact on the model's overall
performance, by simply changing the data order for a single epoch.