A survey on datasets for fairness-aware machine learning

Abstract

As decision-making increasingly relies on Machine Learning (ML) and (big) data, the issue of fairness in data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems is receiving increasing attention from both research and industry. A large variety of fairness-aware machine learning solutions have been proposed which involve fairness-related interventions in the data, learning algorithms and/or model outputs. However, a vital part of proposing new approaches is evaluating them empirically on benchmark datasets that represent realistic and diverse settings. Therefore, in this paper, we overview real-world datasets used for fairness-aware machine learning. We focus on tabular data as the most common data representation for fairness-aware machine learning. We start our analysis by identifying relationships between the different attributes, particularly w.r.t. protected attributes and class attribute, using a Bayesian network. For a deeper understanding of bias in the datasets, we investigate the interesting relationships using exploratory analysis.