Concept
Fairness through unawareness (dropping the protected attribute).
One-sentence definition
Fairness through unawareness is the intuition that a model is fair if it simply does not use the protected attribute as an input.
What real data will illustrate it?
Use any existing audit in the repo where removing the protected attribute leaves the fairness gap nearly unchanged because of proxy variables - the Insurance Denial or Tenant Screening audit works well.
Limitations / trade-offs
It almost always fails: correlated proxies (zip code, name, purchase history) reconstruct the protected attribute. This explainer pairs naturally with the existing proxy-variables and proxy-entanglement explainers.
Hyphens only - no em dashes.
Concept
Fairness through unawareness (dropping the protected attribute).
One-sentence definition
Fairness through unawareness is the intuition that a model is fair if it simply does not use the protected attribute as an input.
What real data will illustrate it?
Use any existing audit in the repo where removing the protected attribute leaves the fairness gap nearly unchanged because of proxy variables - the Insurance Denial or Tenant Screening audit works well.
Limitations / trade-offs
It almost always fails: correlated proxies (zip code, name, purchase history) reconstruct the protected attribute. This explainer pairs naturally with the existing proxy-variables and proxy-entanglement explainers.
Hyphens only - no em dashes.