Joint Transfer of Model Knowledge and Fairness Over Domains Using Wasserstein Distance

Owing to the increasing use of machine learning in our daily lives, the problem of fairness has recently become an important topic in machine learning societies. Recent studies regarding fairness in machine learning have been conducted to attempt to ensure statistical independence between individual model predictions and designated sensitive attributes. However, in reality, cases exist in which the sensitive variables of data used for learning models differ from the data upon which the model is applied. In this paper, we investigate a methodology for developing a fair classification model for data with limited or no labels, by transferring knowledge from another data domain where information is fully available. This is done by controlling the Wasserstein distances between relevant distributions. Subsequently, we obtain a fair model that could be successfully applied to two datasets with different sensitive attributes. We present theoretical results validating that our approach provably transfers both classification performance and fairness over domains. Experimental results show that our method does indeed promote fairness for the target domain, while retaining reasonable classification accuracy, and that it often outperforms comparative models in terms of joint fairness.