Moritz Hardt’s research while affiliated with IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research Center and other places

We propose a criterion for discrimination against a specified sensitive attribute in supervised learning, where the goal is to predict some target based on available features. Assuming data about the predictor, target, and membership in the protected group are available, we show how to optimally adjust any learned predictor so as to remove discrimination according to our definition. Our framework also improves incentives by shifting the cost of poor classification from disadvantaged groups to the decision maker, who can respond by improving the classification accuracy. In line with other studies, our notion is oblivious: it depends only on the joint statistics of the predictor, the target and the protected attribute, but not on interpretation of individualfeatures. We study the inherent limits of defining and identifying biases based on such oblivious measures, outlining what can and cannot be inferred from different oblivious tests. We illustrate our notion using a case study of FICO credit scores.

We consider the problem of identifying the parameters of an unknown mixture of two arbitrary d-dimensional gaussians from a sequence of independent random samples. Our main results are upper and lower bounds giving a computationally efficient moment-based estimator with an optimal convergence rate, thus resolving a problem introduced by Pearson (1894). Denoting by σ² the variance of the unknown mixture, we prove that Θ(σ¹²) samples are necessary and sufficient to estimate each parameter up to constant additive error when d=1. Our upper bound extends to arbitrary dimension d>1 up to a (provably necessary) logarithmic loss in d using a novel---yet simple---dimensionality reduction technique. We further identify several interesting special cases where the sample complexity is notably smaller than our optimal worst-case bound. For instance, if the means of the two components are separated by Ω(σ) the sample complexity reduces to O(σ²) and this is again optimal. Our results also apply to learning each component of the mixture up to small error in total variation distance, where our algorithm gives strong improvements in sample complexity over previous work.