bias-fairness-assessment

Goal

A fairness assessment that identifies where the system performs or behaves disparately across groups, quantifies it with suitable metrics, and proposes mitigations — distinguishing the type of harm.

Frame the harm type first

• Allocative — the system influences resource/opportunity decisions (hiring, lending, housing, moderation, healthcare). Fairness of outcomes matters most.
• Representational — the system depicts/describes groups (stereotyping, erasure, demeaning content, quality-of-service gaps). Fairness of treatment.

Steps

1. Identify groups and context — protected/sensitive attributes relevant to the use case and jurisdiction; note intersectional groups. Define what "fair" means here (it's context-dependent and metrics can conflict).
2. Choose metrics to match the harm:
   • Allocative: demographic parity, equalized odds, equal opportunity, predictive parity, calibration — pick by which error is most harmful; they trade off.
   • Representational/generative: disparate refusal rate, sentiment/toxicity skew, stereotype rate, quality (accuracy/helpfulness) parity across groups.
3. Measure on a representative, consented dataset (watch for unrepresentative or skewed data — that's itself a finding). Report gaps with confidence.
4. Diagnose sources — data imbalance, label bias, proxy features, objective mismatch, feedback loops.
5. Recommend mitigations — data/representation fixes, reweighting/constraints, threshold adjustment, post-processing, human review, scope limits — and note residual disparity and metric trade-offs.

Output

A fairness report: harm type · groups · metric · measured disparity · likely source · mitigation · residual/trade-off. Use security-reporting; visualize gaps with security-diagramming:infographic.

Notes

There is no single "fair" — metrics conflict and the right choice depends on which error harms people most in this context. State the chosen definition and why. Beware proxies: removing a protected attribute doesn't remove bias carried by correlated features.