Publikationen

The use of data-driven decision support by public agencies is becoming more widespread and already influences the allocation of public resources. This raises ethical concerns, as it has adversely affected minorities and historically discriminated groups. In this paper, we use an approach that combines statistics and data-driven approaches with dynamical modeling to assess long-term fairness effects of labor market interventions. Specifically, we develop and use a model to investigate the impact of decisions caused by a public employment authority that selectively supports job-seekers through targeted help. The selection of who receives what help is based on a data-driven intervention model that estimates an individual’s chances of finding a job in a timely manner and rests upon data that describes a population in which skills relevant to the labor market are unevenly distributed between two groups (e.g., males and females). The intervention model has incomplete access to the individual’s actual skills and can augment this with knowledge of the individual’s group affiliation, thus using a protected attribute to increase predictive accuracy. We assess this intervention model’s dynamics—especially fairness-related issues and trade-offs between different fairness goals- over time and compare it to an intervention model that does not use group affiliation as a predictive feature. We conclude that in order to quantify the trade-off correctly and to assess the long-term fairness effects of such a system in the real-world, careful modeling of the surrounding labor market is indispensable.

Classic resource recommenders like Collaborative Filteringtreat users as just another entity, thereby neglecting non-linear user-resource dynamics that shape attention and in-terpretation. SUSTAIN, as an unsupervised human cate-gory learning model, captures these dynamics. It aims tomimic a learner’s categorization behavior. In this paper, weuse three social bookmarking datasets gathered from Bib-Sonomy, CiteULike and Delicious to investigate SUSTAINas a user modeling approach to re-rank and enrich Collab-orative Filtering following a hybrid recommender strategy.Evaluations against baseline algorithms in terms of recom-mender accuracy and computational complexity reveal en-couraging results. Our approach substantially improves Col-laborative Filtering and, depending on the dataset, success-fully competes with a computationally much more expen-sive Matrix Factorization variant. In a further step, we ex-plore SUSTAIN’s dynamics in our specific learning task andshow that both memorization of a user’s history and clus-tering, contribute to the algorithm’s performance. Finally,we observe that the users’ attentional foci determined bySUSTAIN correlate with the users’ level of curiosity, iden-tified by the SPEAR algorithm. Overall, the results ofour study show that SUSTAIN can be used to efficientlymodel attention-interpretation dynamics of users and canhelp improve Collaborative Filtering for resource recommen-dations.