Designing fair ranking schemes

Items from a database are often ranked based on a combination of criteria. The weight given to each criterion in the combination can greatly affect the fairness of the produced ranking, for example, preferring men over women. A user may have the flexibility to choose combinations that weigh these criteria differently, within limits. In this paper, we develop a system that helps users choose criterion weights that lead to greater fairness. We consider ranking functions that compute the score of each item as a weighted sum of (numeric) attribute values, and then sort items on their score. Each ranking function can be expressed as a point in a multidimensional space. For a broad range of fairness criteria, including proportionality, we show how to efficiently identify regions in this space that satisfy these criteria. Using this identification method, our system is able to tell users whether their proposed ranking function satisfies the desired fairness criteria and, if it does not, to suggest the smallest modification that does. Our extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that our methods are able to find solutions that satisfy fairness criteria effectively (usually with only small changes to proposed weight vectors) and efficiently (in interactive time, after some initial pre-processing).