GESD: Beyond Outcome-Oriented Fairness

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making domains such as loan approvals, hiring, and recidivism predictions. While existing fairness metrics (e.g., statistical parity, equal opportunity) effectively quantify outcome-oriented disparities, they offer limited insight into the procedure or explanation behind biased decisions. To address this gap, we propose Group-level Explanation Stability Disparity (GESD), a procedural-oriented fairness metric that measures disparities in the stability, robustness, and sensitivity of model explanations across different subgroups in a protected category. We further integrate GESD into a multi-objective optimization framework that jointly optimizes for utility, outcome-based fairness, and explanation-based fairness called FEU (Fairness–Explainability–Utility). Empirical results on multiple benchmark datasets show that GESD effectively captures group-wise discrepancies in explanation quality, and that FEU improves both utility and fairness over state-of-the-art methods. By bridging outcome-based and explanation-based fairness, GESD offers a comprehensive tool for diagnosing and mitigating bias in predictive modeling. Our code and datasets are available on GitHub https://github.com/horlahsunbo/GESD

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