Fair-CMNB: Advancing Fairness-Aware Stream Learning with Naïve Bayes and Multi-Objective Optimization

Abstract

Fairness-aware mining of data streams is a challenging concern in the contemporary domain of machine learning. Many stream learning algorithms are used to replace humans in critical decision-making processes, e.g., hiring staff, assessing credit risk, etc. This calls for handling massive amounts of incoming information with minimal response delay while ensuring fair and high-quality decisions. Although deep learning has achieved success in various domains, its computational complexity may hinder real-time processing, making traditional algorithms more suitable. In this context, we propose a novel adaptation of Naïve Bayes to mitigate discrimination embedded in the streams while maintaining high predictive performance through multi-objective optimization (MOO). Class imbalance is an inherent problem in discrimination-aware learning paradigms. To deal with class imbalance, we propose a dynamic instance weighting module that gives more importance to new instances and less importance to obsolete instances based on their membership in a minority or majority class. We have conducted experiments on a range of streaming and static datasets and concluded that our proposed methodology outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) fairness-aware methods in terms of both discrimination score and balanced accuracy.