MaryAnn's Blog

Last week, I mentioned three papers that I had read and summarized for the paper. This week, I read the other two papers and added summaries. Additionally, I took a high-level perspective to the papers regarding fairness and attempted to find the pattern between all their fairness metrics. Fairness Through Awareness ( link ) This paper addresses two different ideas in fairness: group fairness and individual fairness. Group fairness looks at how two different groups are treated and says they should be treated the same, or independently of whatever is being measured. For example, if more men are admitted to college than women (and men and women are equally qualified to attend college), then this violates group fairness. A popular way to calculate group fairness is statistical parity, which just says the outcomes of two groups should not be statistically different. Individual fairness tries to get at the point that no individual should be penalized because of a fairness adjustment. M...

In this past week, my task was to summarize the papers I have read pertaining to ranking and fairness in the Related Works section of our paper draft. The objective of our paper is to show how fairness, which has previously been defined for classification-type problems, translates to ranking. Additionally, we believe there exist differences in the way fairness can be interpreted in regards to ranking, and we hope to identify these in our paper. Next week, I will summarize two other papers that I have read/am going to read to put into the Related Works section. From the summaries that I and Caitlin have compiled so far, it appears there are many related but potentially distinct ways to define fairness that may or may not be applicable pre, during, and post processing. I'll define these in more detail next week. Additionally, this next week I will try to make some generality about the definitions of fairness and identify which (if any or if all) of them are applicable at different ...