Auditing fairness under unawareness through counterfactual reasoning

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming the pivotal solution to support critical judgments in many life-changing decisions. In fact, a biased AI tool can be particularly harmful since these systems can contribute to or demote people's well-being. Consequently, government regulations are introducing specific rules to prohibit the use of sensitive features (e.g., gender, race, religion) in the algorithm's decision-making process to avoid unfair outcomes. Unfortunately, such restrictions may not be sufficient to protect people from unfair decisions as algorithms can still behave in a discriminatory manner. Indeed, even when sensitive features are omitted (fairness through unawareness), they could be somehow related to other features, named proxy features. This study shows how to unveil whether a black-box model, complying with the regulations, is still biased or not. We propose an end-to-end bias detection approach exploiting a counterfactual reasoning module and an external classifier for sensitive features. In detail, the counterfactual analysis finds the minimum cost variations that grant a positive outcome, while the classifier detects non-linear patterns of non-sensitive features that proxy sensitive characteristics. The experimental evaluation reveals the proposed method's efficacy in detecting classifiers that learn from proxy features. We also scrutinize the impact of state-of-the-art debiasing algorithms in alleviating the proxy feature problem.