Glossary term
Glossary term
Governance and Compliance
Factoring subjects' sensitive attributes into an algorithmic decision-making process such that different subgroups of people are treated differently.
For example, consider an algorithm that determines Lilliputians' eligibility for a miniature-home loan based on the data they provide in their loan application. If the algorithm uses a Lilliputian's affiliation as Big-Endian or Little-Endian as an input, it is enacting disparate treatment along that dimension.
Contrast with disparate impact, which focuses on disparities in the societal impacts of algorithmic decisions on subgroups, irrespective of whether those subgroups are inputs to the model.
Warning: Because sensitive attributes are almost always correlated with other features the data may have, explicitly removing sensitive attribute information doesn't guarantee that subgroups will be treated equally. For example, removing sensitive demographic attributes from a training dataset that still includes postal code as a feature may address disparate treatment of subgroups, but there still might be disparate impact upon these groups because postal code might serve as a proxy for other demographic information.
For example, consider an algorithm that determines Lilliputians' eligibility for a miniature-home loan based on the data they provide in their loan application. If the algorithm uses a Lilliputian's affiliation as Big-Endian or Little-Endian as an input, it is enacting disparate treatment along that dimension.
Contrast with disparate impact, which focuses on disparities in the societal impacts of algorithmic decisions on subgroups, irrespective of whether those subgroups are inputs to the model.
Created for this library
A bank's compliance team confirms its credit model does not commit disparate treatment by using a protected attribute as a model input.
A hiring-tech vendor documents that its model does not consider gender or ethnicity directly as features to demonstrate the absence of disparate treatment.
A health-tech startup's governance team reviews input features regularly to confirm no protected attribute is used in ways that would amount to disparate treatment.
Definition source: Google for Developers Machine Learning Glossary | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License