Papers › Fairness and Unfairness in Binary and Multiclass Classification: Quantifying,...

Fairness and Unfairness in Binary and Multiclass Classification: Quantifying, Calculating, and Bounding

7 Jun 2022arXiv:2206.03234archive 2025-07-28

Sivan Sabato, Eran Treister, Elad Yom-Tov

We propose a new interpretable measure of unfairness, that allows providing a quantitative analysis of classifier fairness, beyond a dichotomous fair/unfair distinction. We show how this measure can be calculated when the classifier's conditional confusion matrices are known. We further propose methods for auditing classifiers for their fairness when the confusion matrices cannot be obtained or even estimated. Our approach lower-bounds the unfairness of a classifier based only on aggregate statistics, which may be provided by the owner of the classifier or collected from freely available data. We use the equalized odds criterion, which we generalize to the multiclass case. We report experiments on data sets representing diverse applications, which demonstrate the effectiveness and the wide range of possible uses of the proposed methodology. An implementation of the procedures proposed in this paper and as the code for running the experiments are provided in https://github.com/sivansabato/unfairness.

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

31 samples harvested; 24 ran; 4 honoured the contract we drafted; 7 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 31 of the 31 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: 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. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

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