---
title: "Towards Reducing Biases in Combining Multiple Experts Online"
authors:
  - "Yi Sun"
  - "Iván Ramírez Díaz"
  - "Alfredo Cuesta Infante"
  - "Kalyan Veeramachaneni"
doi: "10.24963/ijcai.2021/416"
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/416"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0416.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2021
pages: "3024-3030"
track: "Main Track"
keywords:
  - "Machine Learning: Online Learning"
  - "AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: Fairness"
---

# Towards Reducing Biases in Combining Multiple Experts Online

Yi Sun, Iván Ramírez Díaz, Alfredo Cuesta Infante, Kalyan Veeramachaneni

*Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 3024-3030. DOI: [10.24963/ijcai.2021/416](https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/416)

## Abstract

In many real life situations, including job and loan applications, gatekeepers must make justified and fair real-time decisions about a person’s fitness for a particular opportunity. In this paper, we aim to accomplish approximate group fairness in an online stochastic decision-making process, where the fairness metric we consider is equalized odds. Our work follows from the classical learning-from-experts scheme, assuming a finite set of classifiers (human experts, rules, options, etc) that cannot be modified. We run separate instances of the algorithm for each label class as well as sensitive groups, where the probability of choosing each instance is optimized for both fairness and regret. Our theoretical results show that approximately equalized odds can be achieved without sacrificing much regret. We also demonstrate the performance of the algorithm on real data sets commonly used by the fairness community.