FairSense

This library allow to compute global sensitivity indices in the context of fairness measurements. The paper Fairness seen as Global Sensitivity Analysis bridges the gap between global sensitivity analysis (GSA) and fairness. It states that for each sensitivity analysis, there is a fairness measure, and vice-versa.

@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2103.04613,
  doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2103.04613},  
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04613},  
  author = {Bénesse, Clément and Gamboa, Fabrice and Loubes, Jean-Michel and Boissin, Thibaut},
  keywords = {Statistics Theory (math.ST), Methodology (stat.ME), FOS: Mathematics, FOS: Mathematics, FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences},
  title = {Fairness seen as Global Sensitivity Analysis},

This library is a toolbox which ease the computation of fairness and GSA indices.

The problem

Each index has it's characteristics: some can be applied on continuous variables and some cannot. Some can handle regression problems and some handle classification problems. Some can handle variable groups and some cannot. Finally some can only be applied on the predictions of a model while some can be applied on the error made by the model.

The objective is then to provide a tool to investigate the fairness of an ML problem by computing the GSA indices while avoiding the aforementioned issues.

The strategy

The library allows to formulate a fairness problem which is stated as following:

• a dataset describing the training distribution
• a model which can be a function or a machine learning model
• a fairness objective which indicate what should be studied : one can study the intrinsic bias of a dataset, or the bias of the model or the bias of the model's errors

These elements are encapsulated in an object called IndicesInput.

Then it becomes possible to compute GSA indices (in a interchangeable way) using the functions provided in fairsense.indices.

These functions output IndicesOutput objects that encapsulate the values of the indices. These results can finally be visualized with the functions available in the fairsense.visualization module.

install fairsense

for users

pip install fairsense

for developpers

After cloning the repository

pip install -e .[dev]

to clean code, at the root of the lib:

black .

for docs

pip install -e .[docs]

build rst files, in the docs folder:

sphinx-apidoc ..\libfairness -o source

the generate html docs:

make html

Warning: the library must be installed to generate the doc.