# Probably Approximately Metric-Fair Learning

The seminal work of Dwork {\em et al.} [ITCS 2012] introduced a metric-based notion of individual fairness. Given a task-specific similarity metric, their notion required that every pair of similar individuals should be treated similarly... In the context of machine learning, however, individual fairness does not generalize from a training set to the underlying population. We show that this can lead to computational intractability even for simple fair-learning tasks. With this motivation in mind, we introduce and study a relaxed notion of {\em approximate metric-fairness}: for a random pair of individuals sampled from the population, with all but a small probability of error, if they are similar then they should be treated similarly. We formalize the goal of achieving approximate metric-fairness simultaneously with best-possible accuracy as Probably Approximately Correct and Fair (PACF) Learning. We show that approximate metric-fairness {\em does} generalize, and leverage these generalization guarantees to construct polynomial-time PACF learning algorithms for the classes of linear and logistic predictors. read more

PDF Abstract ICML 2018 PDF ICML 2018 Abstract

## Code Add Remove Mark official

No code implementations yet. Submit your code now

## Datasets

Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

## Results from the Paper Add Remove

Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

## Methods Add Remove

No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here