Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to help humans make decisions in high-stakes settings, such as medicine, criminal justice and education. In each of these cases, the purpose of the risk assessment tool is to inform actions, such as medical treatments or release conditions, often with the aim of reducing the likelihood of an adverse event such as hospital readmission or recidivism. Problematically, most tools are trained and evaluated on historical data in which the outcomes observed depend on the historical decision-making policy. These tools thus reflect risk under the historical policy, rather than under the different decision options that the tool is intended to inform. Even when tools are constructed to predict risk under a specific decision, they are often improperly evaluated as predictors of the target outcome. Focusing on the evaluation task, in this paper we define counterfactual analogues of common predictive performance and algorithmic fairness metrics that we argue are better suited for the decision-making context. We introduce a new method for estimating the proposed metrics using doubly robust estimation. We provide theoretical results that show that only under strong conditions can fairness according to the standard metric and the counterfactual metric simultaneously hold. Consequently, fairness-promoting methods that target parity in a standard fairness metric may-and as we show empirically, do-induce greater imbalance in the counterfactual analogue. We provide empirical comparisons on both synthetic data and a real world child welfare dataset to demonstrate how the proposed method improves upon standard practice.

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We propose a novel algorithm for learning fair representations that can simultaneously mitigate two notions of disparity among different demographic subgroups. Two key components underpinning the design of our algorithm are balanced error rate and conditional alignment of representations. We show how these two components contribute to ensuring accuracy parity and equalized false-positive and false-negative rates across groups without impacting demographic parity. Furthermore, we also demonstrate both in theory and on two real-world experiments that the proposed algorithm leads to a better utility-fairness trade-off on balanced datasets compared with existing algorithms on learning fair representations.

Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to make and inform decisions in a wide variety of high-stakes settings. In practice, there is often a multitude of predictive models that deliver similar overall performance, an empirical phenomenon commonly known as the "Rashomon Effect." While many competing models may perform similarly overall, they may have different properties over various subgroups, and therefore have drastically different predictive fairness properties. In this paper, we develop a framework for characterizing predictive fairness properties over the set of models that deliver similar overall performance, or "the set of good models." We provide tractable algorithms to compute the range of attainable group-level predictive disparities and the disparity minimizing model over the set of good models. We extend our framework to address the empirically relevant challenge of selectively labelled data in the setting where the selection decision and outcome are unconfounded given the observed data features. We illustrate our methods in two empirical applications. In a real world credit-scoring task, we build a model with lower predictive disparities than the benchmark model, and demonstrate the benefits of properly accounting for the selective labels problem. In a recidivism risk prediction task, we audit an existing risk score, and find that it generates larger predictive disparities than any model in the set of good models.

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Recent research increasingly brings to question the appropriateness of using predictive tools in complex, real-world tasks. While a growing body of work has explored ways to improve value alignment in these tools, comparatively less work has centered concerns around the fundamental justifiability of using these tools. This work seeks to center validity considerations in deliberations around whether and how to build data-driven algorithms in high-stakes domains. Toward this end, we translate key concepts from validity theory to predictive algorithms. We apply the lens of validity to re-examine common challenges in problem formulation and data issues that jeopardize the justifiability of using predictive algorithms and connect these challenges to the social science discourse around validity. Our interdisciplinary exposition clarifies how these concepts apply to algorithmic decision making contexts. We demonstrate how these validity considerations could distill into a series of high level questions intended to promote and document reflections on the legitimacy of the predictive task and the suitability of the data.