Professor Warut Khern-am-nuai awarded 2019 SSHRC Insight Development Grant

Warut Khern-am-nuai, Assistant Professor in Information Systems, awarded 2019 SSHRC Insight Development Grant

Economic and Societal Impact of Discrimination-Free Machine Learning

With the popularity of machine learning, the issue of discrimination in machine learning has attracted increasing concerns. Essentially, when an algorithm is applied to prediction tasks that are related to human, a prediction algorithm with the objective to solely optimize its predictive power often pick up biases in the training data and use them in the process. Consequently, the prediction results may discriminate one (or more) group of subjects because of the biases captured in the prediction process. In response to this issue, several studies have proposed fair machine learning algorithms, which are machine learning algorithms that can identify biases in the data and suppress their influence in the prediction process. This research project aims to study the economic implications of fair machine learning algorithms. Particularly, we study how the adoption of fair algorithms impacts the behavior of stakeholders and its effects on user and social welfare.

Prof. Khern-am-nuai is a co-investigator on this team grant with principal investigator Prof. Yossiri Adulyasak of HEC Montréal.

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