Glossary term
Glossary term
Governance and Compliance
A fairness metric that checks whether similar individuals are classified similarly. For example, Brobdingnagian Academy might want to satisfy individual fairness by ensuring that two students with identical grades and standardized test scores are equally likely to gain admission.
Note that individual fairness relies entirely on how you define "similarity" (in this case, grades and test scores), and you can run the risk of introducing new fairness problems if your similarity metric misses important information (such as the rigor of a student's curriculum).
See "Fairness Through Awareness" for a more detailed discussion of individual fairness.
Created for this library
A bank's risk team measures individual fairness by checking that similar applicants receive similar credit decisions.
A hiring-tech vendor measures individual fairness on a curated set of candidate pairs that differ only in non-protected features.
A health-tech startup measures individual fairness by comparing predicted risks for patients with similar clinical profiles.
Definition source: Google for Developers Machine Learning Glossary | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License