OxonFair: A Flexible Toolkit for Algorithmic Fairness

37 Pages Posted: 18 Jul 2024 Last revised: 5 Nov 2024

See all articles by Eoin Delaney

Eoin Delaney

University of Oxford; University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute

Ziaho Fu

University of Oxford

Sandra Wachter

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute

Brent Mittelstadt

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute

Chris Russell

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute

Date Written: June 22, 2024

Abstract

We present OxonFair, a new open source toolkit for enforcing fairness in binary classification. Compared to existing toolkits: (i) We support NLP and Computer Vision classification as well as standard tabular problems. (ii) We support enforcing fairness on validation data, making us robust to a wide range of overfitting challenges. (iii) Our approach can optimize any measure based on True Positives, False Positive, False Negatives, and True Negatives. This makes it easily extensible and much more expressive than existing toolkits. It supports all 9 and all 10 of the decision-based group metrics of two popular review articles. (iv) We jointly optimize a performance objective alongside fairness constraints. This minimizes degradation while enforcing fairness, and even improves the performance of inadequately tuned unfair baselines. OxonFair is compatible with standard ML toolkits, including sklearn, Autogluon, and PyTorch and is available at https://github.com/oxfordinternetinstitute/oxonfair.

Keywords: Fairness Toolkit, Algorithmic Fairness, Bias, Machine Learning, Trustworthy AI

Suggested Citation

Delaney, Eoin and Fu, Ziaho and Wachter, Sandra and Mittelstadt, Brent and Russell, Chris, OxonFair: A Flexible Toolkit for Algorithmic Fairness (June 22, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4894794 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4894794

Eoin Delaney (Contact Author)

University of Oxford ( email )

Mansfield Road
Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 4AU
United Kingdom

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3PG Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

Ziaho Fu

University of Oxford ( email )

Sandra Wachter

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3PG Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

Brent Mittelstadt

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3PG Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

Chris Russell

University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute ( email )

1 St. Giles
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3PG Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

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