Interpretable Distribution-Invariant Fairness Measures for Continuous
  Scores
Ann-Kristin Becker Oana Dumitrasc Klaus Broelemann
Measures of algorithmic fairness are usually discussed in the context of
binary decisions. We extend the approach to continuous scores. So far,
ROC-based measures have mainly been suggested for this purpose. Other existing
methods depend heavily on the distribution of scores, are unsuitable for
ranking tasks, or their effect sizes are not interpretable. Here, we propose a
distributionally invariant version of fairness measures for continuous scores
with a reasonable interpretation based on the Wasserstein distance. Our
measures are easily computable and well suited for quantifying and interpreting
the strength of group disparities as well as for comparing biases across
different models, datasets, or time points. We derive a link between the
different families of existing fairness measures for scores and show that the
proposed distributionally invariant fairness measures outperform ROC-based
fairness measures because they are more explicit and can quantify significant
biases that ROC-based fairness measures miss. Finally, we demonstrate their
effectiveness through experiments on the most commonly used fairness benchmark
datasets.