Dissecting Causal Biases
Rūta Binkytė Sami Zhioua Yassine Turki
Accurately measuring discrimination in machine learning-based automated
decision systems is required to address the vital issue of fairness between
subpopulations and/or individuals. Any bias in measuring discrimination can
lead to either amplification or underestimation of the true value of
discrimination. This paper focuses on a class of bias originating in the way
training data is generated and/or collected. We call such class causal biases
and use tools from the field of causality to formally define and analyze such
biases. Four sources of bias are considered, namely, confounding, selection,
measurement, and interaction. The main contribution of this paper is to
provide, for each source of bias, a closed-form expression in terms of the
model parameters. This makes it possible to analyze the behavior of each source
of bias, in particular, in which cases they are absent and in which other cases
they are maximized. We hope that the provided characterizations help the
community better understand the sources of bias in machine learning
applications.