{"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/the-fragility-of-fairness-causal-sensitivity","title":"The Fragility of Fairness: Causal Sensitivity Analysis for Fair Machine Learning","arxiv_id":"2410.09600","date":"2024-10-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jake Fawkes","Nic Fishman","Mel Andrews","Zachary C. Lipton"],"abstract":"Fairness metrics are a core tool in the fair machine learning literature (FairML), used to determine that ML models are, in some sense, \"fair\". Real-world data, however, are typically plagued by various measurement biases and other violated assumptions, which can render fairness assessments meaningless. We adapt tools from causal sensitivity analysis to the FairML context, providing a general framework which (1) accommodates effectively any combination of fairness metric and bias that can be posed in the \"oblivious setting\"; (2) allows researchers to investigate combinations of biases, resulting in non-linear sensitivity; and (3) enables flexible encoding of domain-specific constraints and assumptions. Employing this framework, we analyze the sensitivity of the most common parity metrics under 3 varieties of classifier across 14 canonical fairness datasets. Our analysis reveals the striking fragility of fairness assessments to even minor dataset biases. We show that causal sensitivity analysis provides a powerful and necessary toolkit for gauging the informativeness of parity metric evaluations. Our repository is available here: https://github.com/Jakefawkes/fragile_fair.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09600v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09600v2.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":"the-fragility-of-fairness-causal-sensitivity","repo_url":"https://github.com/jakefawkes/fragile_fair","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"},{"task_slug":"informativeness","task_name":"Informativeness"},{"task_slug":"sensitivity","task_name":"Sensitivity"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.09600","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.09600"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+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/jakefawkes/fragile_fair","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":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":"c3b600515a6001ed","entry":"get_p","repo":"jakefawkes/fragile_fair","repo_kind":"official","path":"experiments/fogliato_reproduction.py","file_url":"https://github.com/jakefawkes/fragile_fair/blob/HEAD/experiments/fogliato_reproduction.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"c3b600515a6001ed"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}