Fairwalk: Towards Fair Graph Embedding

Fairwalk: Towards Fair Graph Embedding

Tahleen Rahman, Bartlomiej Surma, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3289-3295. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/456

Graph embeddings have gained huge popularity in the recent years as a powerful tool to analyze social networks. However, no prior works have studied potential bias issues inherent within graph embedding. In this paper, we make a first attempt in this direction. In particular, we concentrate on the fairness of node2vec, a popular graph embedding method. Our analyses on two real-world datasets demonstrate the existence of bias in node2vec when used for friendship recommendation. We, therefore, propose a fairness-aware embedding method, namely Fairwalk, which extends node2vec. Experimental results demonstrate that Fairwalk reduces bias under multiple fairness metrics while still preserving the utility.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Data Mining
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Social Sciences
Machine Learning Applications: Networks