Discrimination-Aware Association Rule Mining for Unbiased Data Analytics

A discriminatory dataset refers to a dataset with undesirable correlation between sensitive attributes and the class label, which often leads to biased decision making in data analytics processes. This paper investigates how to build discrimination-aware models even when the available training set is intrinsically discriminating based on some sensitive attributes, such as race, gender or personal status. We propose a new classification method called Discrimination-Aware Association Rule classifier (DAAR), which integrates a new discrimination-aware measure and an association rule mining algorithm. We evaluate the performance of DAAR on three real datasets from different domains and compare it with two non-discrimination-aware classifiers (a standard association rule classification algorithm and the state-of-the-art association rule algorithm SPARCCC), and also with a recently proposed discrimination-aware decision tree method. The results show that DAAR is able to effectively filter out the discriminatory rules and decrease the discrimination on all datasets with insignificant impact on the predictive accuracy.