CrossWalk: Fairness-enhanced Node Representation Learning

The potential for machine learning systems to amplify social inequities and unfairness is receiving increasing popular and academic attention. Much recent work has focused on developing algorithmic tools to assess and mitigate such unfairness. However, there is little work on enhancing fairness in graph algorithms. Here, we develop a simple, effective and general method, CrossWalk, that enhances fairness of various graph algorithms, including influence maximization, link prediction and node classification, applied to node embeddings. CrossWalk is applicable to any random walk based node representation learning algorithm, such as DeepWalk and Node2Vec. The key idea is to bias random walks to cross group boundaries, by upweighting edges which (1) are closer to the groups' peripheries or (2) connect different groups in the network. CrossWalk pulls nodes that are near groups' peripheries towards their neighbors from other groups in the embedding space, while preserving the necessary structural information from the graph. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our algorithm to enhance fairness in various graph algorithms, including influence maximization, link prediction and node classification in synthetic and real networks, with only a very small decrease in performance.

Adversarial Graph Embeddings for Fair Influence Maximization over Social Networks

Influence maximization is a widely studied topic in network science, where the aim is to reach the maximum possible number of nodes, while only targeting a small initial set of individuals. It has critical applications in many fields, including viral marketing, information propagation, news dissemination, and vaccinations. However, the objective does not usually take into account whether the final set of influenced nodes is fair with respect to sensitive attributes, such as race or gender. Here we address fair influence maximization, aiming to reach minorities more equitably. We introduce Adversarial Graph Embeddings: we co-train an auto-encoder for graph embedding and a discriminator to discern sensitive attributes. This leads to embeddings which are similarly distributed across sensitive attributes. We then find a good initial set by clustering the embeddings. We believe we are the first to use embeddings for the task of fair influence maximization. While there are typically trade-offs between fairness and influence maximization objectives, our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach dramatically reduces disparity while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art influence maximization methods.

Optimal Decision Making Under Strategic Behavior

We are witnessing an increasing use of data-driven predictive models to inform decisions. As decisions have implications for individuals and society, there is increasing pressure on decision makers to be transparent about their decision policies, models, and the features they use. At the same time, individuals may use knowledge, gained by transparency, to invest effort strategically in order to maximize their chances of receiving a beneficial decision. In this paper, our goal is to find decision policies that are optimal in terms of utility in such a strategic setting. To this end, we first use the theory of optimal transport to characterize how strategic investment of effort by individuals leads to a change in the feature distribution at a population level. Then, we show that, in contrast with the non-strategic setting, optimal decision policies are stochastic, and we cannot expect to find them in polynomial time. Finally, we derive an efficient greedy algorithm that is guaranteed to find locally optimal decision policies in polynomial time. Experiments on synthetic and real lending data illustrate our theoretical findings and show that the decision policies found by our greedy algorithm achieve higher utility than deterministic threshold rules, which are optimal policies in a non-strategic setting.