Group Fairness in Set Packing Problems

Group Fairness in Set Packing Problems

Sharmila Duppala, Juan Luque, John Dickerson, Aravind Srinivasan

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 391-399. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/44

Kidney exchange programs (KEPs) typically seek to match incompatible patient-donor pairs based on a utilitarian objective where the number or overall quality of transplants is maximized---implicitly penalizing certain classes of difficult to match (e.g., highly-sensitized) patients. Prioritizing the welfare of highly-sensitized (hard-to-match) patients has been studied as a natural \textit{fairness} criterion. We formulate the KEP problem as $k$-set packing with a probabilistic group fairness notion of proportionality fairness---namely, fair $k$-set packing (\f{}). In this work we propose algorithms that take arbitrary proportionality vectors (i.e., policy-informed demands of how to prioritize different groups) and return a probabilistically fair solution with provable guarantees. Our main contributions are randomized algorithms as well as hardness results for \f{} variants. Additionally, the tools we introduce serve to audit the price of fairness involved in prioritizing different groups in realistic KEPs and other $k$-set packing applications. We conclude with experiments on synthetic and realistic kidney exchange \textsc{FairSP} instances.
Keywords:
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Fairness and diversity
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Other
Search: S: Combinatorial search and optimisation