{"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/bias-in-evaluation-processes-an-optimization-1","title":"Bias in Evaluation Processes: An Optimization-Based Model","arxiv_id":"2310.17489","date":"2023-10-26","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2023 11","authors":["L. Elisa Celis","Amit Kumar","Anay Mehrotra","Nisheeth K. Vishnoi"],"abstract":"Biases with respect to socially-salient attributes of individuals have been well documented in evaluation processes used in settings such as admissions and hiring. We view such an evaluation process as a transformation of a distribution of the true utility of an individual for a task to an observed distribution and model it as a solution to a loss minimization problem subject to an information constraint. Our model has two parameters that have been identified as factors leading to biases: the resource-information trade-off parameter in the information constraint and the risk-averseness parameter in the loss function. We characterize the distributions that arise from our model and study the effect of the parameters on the observed distribution. The outputs of our model enrich the class of distributions that can be used to capture variation across groups in the observed evaluations. We empirically validate our model by fitting real-world datasets and use it to study the effect of interventions in a downstream selection task. These results contribute to an understanding of the emergence of bias in evaluation processes and provide tools to guide the deployment of interventions to mitigate biases.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17489v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.17489v1.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":"bias-in-evaluation-processes-an-optimization-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/anaymehrotra/bias-in-evaluation-processes","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2310.17489","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.17489","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2310.17489"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/anaymehrotra/bias-in-evaluation-processes","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"d02ae5349cf59dce","entry":"Bias_Framework","repo":"anaymehrotra/bias-in-evaluation-processes","repo_kind":"official","path":"framework.py","file_url":"https://github.com/anaymehrotra/bias-in-evaluation-processes/blob/HEAD/framework.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"d02ae5349cf59dce"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}