Individual Fairness

Group fairness, as studied in Chap. 8 , considered fairness from a global perspective, in the entire population, by attempting to answer the question “are individuals in the advantaged group and in the disadvantaged group treated differently?” Or more formally, are the predictions and the protected variable globally independent? Here, we focus on a specific individual, in the disadvantaged group, and we talk about discrimination (in a broad sense, or inequity) by asking what the model would have predicted if this same person had been in the favored group. We return here to the classical approaches, emphasizing the different approaches to constructing a counterfactual for this individual.