Fair Outlier Detection Based on Adversarial Representation Learning

Abstract

Outlier detection aims to identify rare, minority objects in a dataset that are significantly different from the majority. When a minority group (defined by sensitive attributes, such as gender, race, age, etc.) does not represent the target group for outlier detection, outlier detection methods are likely to propagate statistical biases in the data and generate unfair results. Our work focuses on studying the fairness of outlier detection. We characterize the properties of fair outlier detection and propose an appropriate outlier detection method that combines adversarial representation learning and the LOF algorithm (AFLOF). Unlike the FairLOF method that adds fairness constraints to the LOF algorithm, AFLOF uses adversarial networks to learn the optimal representation of the original data while hiding the sensitive attribute in the data. We introduce a dynamic weighting module that assigns lower weight values to data objects with higher local outlier factors to eliminate the influence of outliers on representation learning. Lastly, we conduct comparative experiments on six publicly available datasets. The results demonstrate that compared to the density-based LOF method and the recently proposed FairLOF method, our proposed AFLOF method has a significant advantage in both the outlier detection performance and fairness.

Keywords

• fair outlier detection
• algorithmic fairness
• adversarially fair representation learning
• local outlier factors
• symmetric structure