Fair Recommendations with Limited Sensitive Attributes: A Distributionally Robust Optimization Approach
Pages 448 - 457
Abstract
As recommender systems are indispensable in various domains such as job searching and e-commerce, providing equitable recommendations to users with different sensitive attributes becomes an imperative requirement. Prior approaches for enhancing fairness in recommender systems presume the availability of all sensitive attributes, which can be difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns or inadequate means of capturing these attributes. In practice, the efficacy of these approaches is limited, pushing us to investigate ways of promoting fairness with limited sensitive attribute information. Toward this goal, it is important to reconstruct missing sensitive attributes. Nevertheless, reconstruction errors are inevitable due to the complexity of real-world sensitive attribute reconstruction problems and legal regulations. Thus, we pursue fair learning methods that are robust to reconstruction errors. To this end, we propose Distributionally Robust Fair Optimization (DRFO), which minimizes the worst-case unfairness over all potential probability distributions of missing sensitive attributes instead of the reconstructed one to account for the impact of the reconstruction errors. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence to demonstrate that our method can effectively ensure fairness in recommender systems when only limited sensitive attributes are accessible.
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July 2024
3164 pages
ISBN:9798400704314
DOI:10.1145/3626772
- General Chairs:
- Grace Hui Yang,
- Hongning Wang,
- Sam Han,
- Program Chairs:
- Claudia Hauff,
- Guido Zuccon,
- Yi Zhang
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Published: 11 July 2024
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- CCCD Key Lab of Ministry of Culture and Tourism
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SIGIR 2024: The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
July 14 - 18, 2024
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