What is an individual fairness?
A fairness metric that checks whether similar individuals are classified similarly.
individual fairness explained in plain English
A fairness metric that checks whether similar individuals are classified similarly. For example, Brobdingnagian Academy might want to satisfy individual fairness by ensuring that two students with identical grades and standardized test scores are equally likely to gain admission. Note that individual fairness relies entirely on how you define "similarity" (in this case, grades and test scores), and you can run the risk of introducing new fairness problems if your similarity metric misses important information (such as the rigor of a student's curriculum). See"Fairness Through Awareness" for a more detailed discussion of individual fairness.
Example
Practitioners refer to individual fairness when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.
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1.
- bias (math) or bias term
An intercept or offset from an origin.
- confirmation bias
The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses.
- counterfactual fairness
A fairness metric that checks whether a classification model produces the same result for one individual as it does for another individual who is identical to the first, except with respect to one or more sensitive attributes.
- demographic parity
A fairness metric that is satisfied if the results of a model's classification are not dependent on a given sensitive attribute.
- discriminative model
A model that predicts labels from a set of one or more features.
- equality of opportunity
A fairness metric to assess whether a model is predicting the desirable outcome equally well for all values of a sensitive attribute.
- equalized odds
A fairness metric to assess whether a model is predicting outcomes equally well for all values of a sensitive attribute with respect to both the positive class and negative class—not just one class or the other exclusively.
- evaluation
The process of measuring a model's quality or comparing different models against each other.
- fairness metric
A mathematical definition of "fairness" that is measurable.