Bringing Causality into Fairness: Application to Pretrial Public Safety Assessment

Using the concept of principal stratification from the causal inference literature, we introduce a new notion of fairness, called principal fairness, for human and algorithmic decision-making. Principal fairness states that one should not discriminate among individuals who would be similarly affected by the decision. Unlike the existing statistical definitions of fairness, principal fairness explicitly accounts for the fact that individuals can be impacted by the decision.  We also explain how principal fairness relates to the existing causality-based fairness criteria. In contrast to the counterfactual fairness criteria, for example, principal fairness considers the effects of the decision in question rather than those of protected attributes of interest. Finally, we apply the proposed methodology to preliminary data from the first-ever randomized controlled trial that evaluates the pretrial Public Safety Assessment (PSA) in the criminal justice system.

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