{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-empirical-study-on-fairness-improvement","title":"Fairness Improvement with Multiple Protected Attributes: How Far Are We?","arxiv_id":"2308.01923","date":"2023-07-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhenpeng Chen","Jie M. Zhang","Federica Sarro","Mark Harman"],"abstract":"Existing research mostly improves the fairness of Machine Learning (ML) software regarding a single protected attribute at a time, but this is unrealistic given that many users have multiple protected attributes. This paper conducts an extensive study of fairness improvement regarding multiple protected attributes, covering 11 state-of-the-art fairness improvement methods. We analyze the effectiveness of these methods with different datasets, metrics, and ML models when considering multiple protected attributes. The results reveal that improving fairness for a single protected attribute can largely decrease fairness regarding unconsidered protected attributes. This decrease is observed in up to 88.3% of scenarios (57.5% on average). More surprisingly, we find little difference in accuracy loss when considering single and multiple protected attributes, indicating that accuracy can be maintained in the multiple-attribute paradigm. However, the effect on F1-score when handling two protected attributes is about twice that of a single attribute. This has important implications for future fairness research: reporting only accuracy as the ML performance metric, which is currently common in the literature, is inadequate.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01923v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.01923v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-empirical-study-on-fairness-improvement","repo_url":"https://github.com/chenzhenpeng18/icse24-multi-attribute-fairness","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"attribute","task_name":"Attribute"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}