Rethinking Fairness Metrics for Multi-Class and Multi-Group Assessment: Not Everything is Binary

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning in general, is becoming pervasive across all domains and disciplines. By means of this data-driven approach, algorithms can learns complex task just by learning from samples. However, if the data-set is biased, they might lead to the development of unfair computer systems, that is, characterised by a prejudice towards specific individuals or groups, which might get an unmotivated output from the system. This circumstance lead to the development of multiple metrics designed to quantify the level of unfairness of an algorithm. However, a generalised assumption in the literature is that the sensitive features and the output labels are binary. When the data is not binary, it is forcefully binarized using a one-versus-the-rest simplification. In this work, we discuss the limitations of existing metrics and propose novel, mathematically sound, and generalized multi-group and multi-class formulations of the metrics. Ultimately, our results highlight the empirical assessment distortion caused by binarization strategies, which reveals the limitations of binary fairness metrics in the multi class setting.