1. A Fair Post-Processing Method based on the MADD Metric for Predictive Student Models
- Author
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Verger, Mélina, Fan, Chunyang, Lallé, Sébastien, Bouchet, François, and Luengo, Vanda
- Subjects
Computer Science - Computers and Society ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence ,Computer Science - Discrete Mathematics ,Computer Science - Machine Learning ,Statistics - Machine Learning - Abstract
Predictive student models are increasingly used in learning environments. However, due to the rising social impact of their usage, it is now all the more important for these models to be both sufficiently accurate and fair in their predictions. To evaluate algorithmic fairness, a new metric has been developed in education, namely the Model Absolute Density Distance (MADD). This metric enables us to measure how different a predictive model behaves regarding two groups of students, in order to quantify its algorithmic unfairness. In this paper, we thus develop a post-processing method based on this metric, that aims at improving the fairness while preserving the accuracy of relevant predictive models' results. We experiment with our approach on the task of predicting student success in an online course, using both simulated and real-world educational data, and obtain successful results. Our source code and data are in open access at https://github.com/melinaverger/MADD ., Comment: 1st International Tutorial and Workshop on Responsible Knowledge Discovery in Education (RKDE 2023) at ECML PKDD 2023, September 2023, Turino, Italy
- Published
- 2024