Attainability and Optimality: The Equalized-Odds Fairness Revisited

Fairness of machine learning algorithms has been of increasing interest. In order to suppress or eliminate discrimination in prediction, various notions as well as approaches to impose fairness have been proposed. However, in different scenarios, whether or not the chosen notion of fairness can always be attained, even if with unlimited amount of data, is not well addressed. In this paper, focusing on the Equalized Odds notion of fairness, we consider the attainability of this criterion, and furthermore, if attainable, the optimality of the prediction performance under various settings. In particular, for classification with a deterministic prediction function of the input, we give the condition under which Equalized Odds can hold true; if randomized prediction is acceptable, we show that under mild assumptions, fair classifiers can always be derived. Moreover, we prove that compared to enforcing fairness by post-processing, one can always benefit from exploiting all available features during training and get better prediction performance while remaining fair. However, for regression tasks, Equalized Odds is not always attainable if certain conditions on the joint distribution of the features and the target variable are not met. This indicates the inherent difficulty in achieving fairness in certain cases and suggests a broader class of prediction methods might be needed for fairness.