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The New England Journal of Statistics in Data Science


Fairness and Randomness in Machine Learning: Statistical Independence and Relativization
Volume 3, Issue 1 (2025), pp. 55–72
Pub. online: 19 November 2024      Type: Methodology Article      Open accessOpen Access
Area: Machine Learning and Data Mining
Published
19 November 2024

Abstract

Fair Machine Learning endeavors to prevent unfairness arising in the context of machine learning applications embedded in society. To this end, several mathematical fairness notions have been proposed. The most known and used notions turn out to be expressed in terms of statistical independence, which is taken to be a primitive and unambiguous notion. However, two choices remain (and are largely unexamined to date): what exactly is the meaning of statistical independence and what are the groups to which we ought to be fair? We answer both questions by leveraging Richard Von Mises’ theory of probability, which starts with data, and then builds the machinery of probability from the ground up. In particular, his theory places a relative definition of randomness as statistical independence at the center of statistical modelling. Much in contrast to the classically used, absolute i.i.d.-randomness, which turns out to be “orthogonal” to his conception. We show how Von Mises’ frequential modeling approach fits well to the problem of fair machine learning and show how his theory (suitably interpreted) demonstrates the equivalence between the contestability of the choice of groups in the fairness criterion and the contestability of the choice of relative randomness. We thus conclude that the problem of being fair in machine learning is precisely as hard as the problem of defining what is meant by being random. In both cases there is a consequential choice, yet there is no universal “right” choice possible.

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© 2025 New England Statistical Society
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Keywords
Fairness in machine learning Richard von Mises Randomness Statistical independence

Funding
This work was funded in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy — EXC number 2064/1 — Project number 390727645; it was also supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF): Tübingen AI Center.

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