Machine learning based systems and products are reaching society at large in many aspects of everyday life, including financial lending, online advertising, pretrial and immigration detention, child maltreatment screening, health care, social services, and education. This phenomenon has been accompanied by an increase in concern about the ethical issues that may rise from the adoption of these technologies. In response to this concern, a new area of machine learning has recently emerged that studies how to address disparate treatment caused by algorithmic errors and bias in the data. The central question is how to ensure that the learned model does not treat subgroups in the population unfairly. While the design of solutions to this issue requires an interdisciplinary effort, fundamental progress can only be achieved through a radical change in the machine learning paradigm. In this work, we will describe the state of the art on algorithmic fairness using statistical learning theory, machine learning, and deep learning approaches that are able to learn fair models and data representation.
Machine Learning for Social Services: A Study of Prenatal Case Management in Illinois