Breaking Fair Binary Classification with Optimal Flipping Attacks

Abstract

Minimizing risk with fairness constraints is one of the popular approaches to learning a fair classifier. Recent works showed that this approach yields an unfair classifier if the training set is corrupted. In this work, we study the minimum amount of data corruption required for a successful flipping attack. First, we find lower/upper bounds on this quantity and show that these bounds are tight when the target model is the unique unconstrained risk minimizer. Second, we propose a computationally efficient data poisoning attack algorithm that can compromise the performance of fair learning algorithms.