{"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/balancing-competing-objectives-with-noisy","title":"Balancing Competing Objectives with Noisy Data: Score-Based Classifiers for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning","arxiv_id":"2003.06740","date":"2020-03-15","proceeding":"ICML 2020 1","authors":["Esther Rolf","Max Simchowitz","Sarah Dean","Lydia T. Liu","Daniel Björkegren","Moritz Hardt","Joshua Blumenstock"],"abstract":"While real-world decisions involve many competing objectives, algorithmic decisions are often evaluated with a single objective function. In this paper, we study algorithmic policies which explicitly trade off between a private objective (such as profit) and a public objective (such as social welfare). We analyze a natural class of policies which trace an empirical Pareto frontier based on learned scores, and focus on how such decisions can be made in noisy or data-limited regimes. Our theoretical results characterize the optimal strategies in this class, bound the Pareto errors due to inaccuracies in the scores, and show an equivalence between optimal strategies and a rich class of fairness-constrained profit-maximizing policies. We then present empirical results in two different contexts -- online content recommendation and sustainable abalone fisheries -- to underscore the applicability of our approach to a wide range of practical decisions. Taken together, these results shed light on inherent trade-offs in using machine learning for decisions that impact social welfare.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.06740v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.06740v4.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":"balancing-competing-objectives-with-noisy","repo_url":"https://github.com/estherrolf/multi-objective-impact","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-learning","task_name":"BIG-bench Machine Learning"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2003.06740","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}