Unveiling systematic biases in decisional processes: an application to discrimination discovery

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
2 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Decisional processes are at the basis of several security and privacy applications. However, they are often not transparent and can be affected by human or algorithmic biases that may lead to systematically misleading or unfair outcomes. To unveil these biases, one has to identify which information was used to make the decision and to quantify to what extent such information has influenced the process outcome. Two classes of techniques are widely used to determine possible correlation between variables within decisional processes from observational data: (i) econometric techniques, in particular regression analysis, and (ii) knowledge discovery techniques, in particular association rules mining. However, these techniques, taken individually, have intrinsic drawbacks that limit their applicability. In thiswork, we propose an approach for unveiling biases in decisional processes, which leverages association rule mining for systematic hypothesis generation and regression analysis for model selection and recommendation extraction. We demonstrate the proposed approach in the context of discrimination detection, showing that not only it provides 'statistically significant' evidence of discrimination but it also allows for a more efficient operationalization of the recommendations extracted, upon which the decision maker can operate.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAsiaCCS 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages67-72
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-6752-3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Jul 2019
Event2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, AsiaCCS 2019 - Auckland, New Zealand
Duration: 9 Jul 201912 Jul 2019

Conference

Conference2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, AsiaCCS 2019
Country/TerritoryNew Zealand
CityAuckland
Period9/07/1912/07/19

Keywords

  • Association Rule Mining
  • Decisional Process
  • Econometrics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Unveiling systematic biases in decisional processes: an application to discrimination discovery'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this