Recent approaches to behavioural user profiling employ Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to turn users' interactions with a platform into actionable knowledge. The effectiveness of an approach is usually assessed with accuracy-based perspectives, where the capability to predict user features (such as gender or age) is evaluated. In this work, we perform a beyond-accuracy analysis of the state-of-the-art approaches to assess the presence of disparate impact and disparate mistreatment, meaning that users characterised by a given sensitive feature are unintentionally, but systematically, classified worse than their counterparts. Our analysis on two real-world datasets shows that different user profiling paradigms can impact fairness results. The source code and the preprocessed datasets are available at: https://github.com/erasmopurif/do_gnns_build_fair_models.

Do Graph Neural Networks Build Fair User Models? Assessing Disparate Impact and Mistreatment in Behavioural User Profiling

Boratto L.;
2022-01-01

Abstract

Recent approaches to behavioural user profiling employ Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to turn users' interactions with a platform into actionable knowledge. The effectiveness of an approach is usually assessed with accuracy-based perspectives, where the capability to predict user features (such as gender or age) is evaluated. In this work, we perform a beyond-accuracy analysis of the state-of-the-art approaches to assess the presence of disparate impact and disparate mistreatment, meaning that users characterised by a given sensitive feature are unintentionally, but systematically, classified worse than their counterparts. Our analysis on two real-world datasets shows that different user profiling paradigms can impact fairness results. The source code and the preprocessed datasets are available at: https://github.com/erasmopurif/do_gnns_build_fair_models.
2022
9781450392365
Fairness; Graph neural networks; User models; User profiling
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11584/348359
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