Fair Collective Classification in Networked Data

Collective classification utilizes network structure information via label propagation to improve prediction accuracy for node classification tasks. Because these models use information from previously labeled nodes which often contain historical bias, they may result in predictions that are biased w.r.t. the sensitive attributes of nodes such as race and gender. Throughout inference, this bias may even be amplified due to propagation especially for networks characterized by homophily. Despite past and ongoing research on fair classification, research to ensure fair collective classification s till remains unexplored. In this paper, we present a fair collective classification framework (denoted as FairCC) and formulate various heuristic methodologies, including node reweighting, threshold adjustment, and postprocessing, to achieve fair prediction. We also implement and test several naive methodologies for fair collective classification. Experiments on semi-synthetic datasets highlight the insufficiency of the naive methodologies and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristics in significantly reducing prediction bias.