Papers › Structural Group Unfairness: Measurement and Mitigation by means of the Effective Resistance
Structural Group Unfairness: Measurement and Mitigation by means of the Effective Resistance
Adrian Arnaiz-Rodriguez, Georgina Curto, Nuria Oliver
Social networks contribute to the distribution of social capital, defined as the relationships, norms of trust and reciprocity within a community or society that facilitate cooperation and collective action. Therefore, better positioned members in a social network benefit from faster access to diverse information and higher influence on information dissemination. A variety of methods have been proposed in the literature to measure social capital at an individual level. However, there is a lack of methods to quantify social capital at a group level, which is particularly important when the groups are defined on the grounds of protected attributes. To fill this gap, we propose to measure the social capital of a group of nodes by means of the effective resistance and emphasize the importance of considering the entire network topology. Grounded in spectral graph theory, we introduce three effective resistance-based measures of group social capital, namely group isolation, group diameter and group control, where the groups are defined according to the value of a protected attribute. We denote the social capital disparity among different groups in a network as structural group unfairness, and propose to mitigate it by means of a budgeted edge augmentation heuristic that systematically increases the social capital of the most disadvantaged group. In experiments on real-world networks, we uncover significant levels of structural group unfairness when using gender as the protected attribute, with females being the most disadvantaged group in comparison to males. We also illustrate how our proposed edge augmentation approach is able to not only effectively mitigate the structural group unfairness but also increase the social capital of all groups in the network.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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.
Tasks
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