Learning Optimal Fair Scoring Systems for Multi-Class Classification

Abstract

Machine Learning models are increasingly used for decision making, in particular in high-stakes applications such as credit scoring, medicine or recidivism prediction. However, there are growing concerns about these models with respect to their lack of interpretability and the undesirable biases they can generate or reproduce. While the concepts of interpretability and fairness have been extensively studied by the scientific community in recent years, few works have tackled the general multi-class classification problem under fairness constraints, and none of them proposes to generate fair and interpretable models for multi-class classification. In this paper, we use Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) techniques to produce inherently interpretable scoring systems under sparsity and fairness constraints, for the general multi-class classification setup. Our work generalizes the SLIM (Supersparse Linear Integer Models) framework that was proposed by Rudin and Ustun to learn optimal scoring systems for binary classification. The use of MILP techniques allows for an easy integration of diverse operational constraints (such as, but not restricted to, fairness or sparsity), but also for the building of certifiably optimal models (or sub-optimal models with bounded optimality gap).