Papers › A survey on measuring indirect discrimination in machine learning

A survey on measuring indirect discrimination in machine learning

31 Oct 2015arXiv:1511.00148links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Indre Zliobaite

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Nowadays, many decisions are made using predictive models built on historical data.Predictive models may systematically discriminate groups of people even if the computing process is fair and well-intentioned. Discrimination-aware data mining studies how to make predictive models free from discrimination, when historical data, on which they are built, may be biased, incomplete, or even contain past discriminatory decisions. Discrimination refers to disadvantageous treatment of a person based on belonging to a category rather than on individual merit. In this survey we review and organize various discrimination measures that have been used for measuring discrimination in data, as well as in evaluating performance of discrimination-aware predictive models. We also discuss related measures from other disciplines, which have not been used for measuring discrimination, but potentially could be suitable for this purpose. We computationally analyze properties of selected measures. We also review and discuss measuring procedures, and present recommendations for practitioners. The primary target audience is data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, statistical modeling researchers developing new methods for non-discriminatory predictive modeling. In addition, practitioners and policy makers would use the survey for diagnosing potential discrimination by predictive models.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

zliobaite/paper-fairml-survey officialmentioned in paperMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections