Statistical Guarantees for Fairness Aware Plug-In Algorithms
A plug-in algorithm to estimate Bayes Optimal Classifiers for fairness-aware binary classification has been proposed in (Menon Williamson, 2018). However, the statistical efficacy of their approach has not been established. We prove that the plug-in algorithm is statistically consistent. We also derive finite sample guarantees associated with learning the Bayes Optimal Classifiers via the plug-in algorithm. Finally, we propose a protocol that modifies the plug-in approach, so as to simultaneously guarantee fairness and differential privacy with respect to a binary feature deemed sensitive.
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