Automated discovery of trade-off between utility, privacy and fairness
  in machine learning models
Bogdan Ficiu Neil D. Lawrence Andrei Paleyes
Machine learning models are deployed as a central component in decision
making and policy operations with direct impact on individuals' lives. In order
to act ethically and comply with government regulations, these models need to
make fair decisions and protect the users' privacy. However, such requirements
can come with decrease in models' performance compared to their potentially
biased, privacy-leaking counterparts. Thus the trade-off between fairness,
privacy and performance of ML models emerges, and practitioners need a way of
quantifying this trade-off to enable deployment decisions. In this work we
interpret this trade-off as a multi-objective optimization problem, and propose
PFairDP, a pipeline that uses Bayesian optimization for discovery of
Pareto-optimal points between fairness, privacy and utility of ML models. We
show how PFairDP can be used to replicate known results that were achieved
through manual constraint setting process. We further demonstrate effectiveness
of PFairDP with experiments on multiple models and datasets.