We study the linear contextual bandit problem where an agent has to select one candidate from a pool and each candidate belongs to a sensitive group. In this setting, candidates' rewards may not be directly comparable between groups, for example when the agent is an employer hiring candidates from different ethnic groups and some groups have a lower reward due to discriminatory bias and/or social injustice. We propose a notion of fairness that states that the agent's policy is fair when it selects a candidate with highest relative rank, which measures how good the reward is when compared to candidates from the same group. This is a very strong notion of fairness, since the relative rank is not directly observed by the agent and depends on the underlying reward model and on the distribution of rewards. Thus we study the problem of learning a policy which approximates a fair policy under the condition that the contexts are independent between groups and the distribution of rewards of each group is absolutely continuous. In particular, we design a greedy policy which at each round constructs a ridge regression estimator from the observed context-reward pairs, and then computes an estimate of the relative rank of each candidate using the empirical cumulative distribution function. We prove that the greedy policy achieves, after T rounds, up to log factors and with high probability, a fair pseudo-regret of order √dT , where d is the dimension of the context vectors. The policy also satisfies demographic parity at each round when averaged over all possible information available before the selection. We finally show with a proof of concept simulation that our policy achieves sub-linear fair pseudo-regret also in practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.