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arXiv · 1903.02088

Limitations of Pinned AUC for Measuring Unintended Bias

Daniel Borkan·Lucas Dixon·John Li·Jeffrey Sorensen·Nithum Thain·Lucy Vasserman
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Abstract

This report examines the Pinned AUC metric introduced and highlights some of its limitations. Pinned AUC provides a threshold-agnostic measure of unintended bias in a classification model, inspired by the ROC-AUC metric. However, as we highlight in this report, there are ways that the metric can obscure different kinds of unintended biases when the underlying class distributions on which bias is being measured are not carefully controlled.

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Daniel Borkan, Lucas Dixon, John Li, Jeffrey Sorensen, Nithum Thain, Lucy Vasserman. 2019-03-05. Limitations of Pinned AUC for Measuring Unintended Bias. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.02088

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