Fairness Under Demographic Scarce Regime
Patrik Joslin Kenfack Samira Ebrahimi Kahou Ulrich Aïvodji
Most existing works on fairness assume the model has full access to
demographic information. However, there exist scenarios where demographic
information is partially available because a record was not maintained
throughout data collection or due to privacy reasons. This setting is known as
demographic scarce regime. Prior research have shown that training an attribute
classifier to replace the missing sensitive attributes (proxy) can still
improve fairness. However, the use of proxy-sensitive attributes worsens
fairness-accuracy trade-offs compared to true sensitive attributes. To address
this limitation, we propose a framework to build attribute classifiers that
achieve better fairness-accuracy trade-offs. Our method introduces uncertainty
awareness in the attribute classifier and enforces fairness on samples with
demographic information inferred with the lowest uncertainty. We show
empirically that enforcing fairness constraints on samples with uncertain
sensitive attributes is detrimental to fairness and accuracy. Our experiments
on two datasets showed that the proposed framework yields models with
significantly better fairness-accuracy trade-offs compared to classic attribute
classifiers. Surprisingly, our framework outperforms models trained with
constraints on the true sensitive attributes.