Designing Fair Ranking Schemes
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Items from a database are often ranked based on a combination of multiple criteria. Often, a user may have flexibility to accept combinations that weight these criteria differently, within limits. On the other hand, this choice of weights can greatly affect the fairness of the ranking produced. In this paper, we develop a system that helps users choose criterion weights that lead to greater fairness. We consider ranking functions that compute the score of each item as a weighted sum of (numeric) attribute values, and then sort items on their score. Each ranking function can then be expressed as a vector of weights, or a point in a multi-dimensional space. For a broad range of fairness criteria, we show how to efficiently identify regions in this space that satisfy these criteria. Using this identification, our system is able to tell users whether their proposed ranking function satisfies the desired fairness criteria and if it does not, to suggest the smallest modification which does. Our extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that our methods are able to find solutions that satisfy fairness criteria effectively and efficiently.
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