Towards Inclusive Fairness Evaluation via Eliciting Disagreement Feedback from Non-Expert Stakeholders (2304.03801v1)

Abstract: Traditional algorithmic fairness notions rely on label feedback, which can only be elicited from expert critics. However, in most practical applications, several non-expert stakeholders also play a major role in the system and can have distinctive opinions about the decision making philosophy. For example, in kidney placement programs, transplant surgeons are very wary about accepting kidney offers for black patients due to genetic reasons. However, non-expert stakeholders in kidney placement programs (e.g. patients, donors and their family members) may misinterpret such decisions from the perspective of social discrimination. This paper evaluates group fairness notions from the viewpoint of non-expert stakeholders, who can only provide binary \emph{agreement/disagreement feedback} regarding the decision in context. Specifically, two types of group fairness notions have been identified: (i) \emph{definite notions} (e.g. calibration), which can be evaluated exactly using disagreement feedback, and (ii) \emph{indefinite notions} (e.g. equal opportunity) which suffer from uncertainty due to lack of label feedback. In the case of indefinite notions, bounds are presented based on disagreement rates, and an estimate is constructed based on established bounds. The efficacy of all our findings are validated empirically on real human feedback dataset.