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Abstract
Machine learning (ML) algorithms rely primarily on the availability of
training data, and, depending on the domain, these data may include sensitive
information about the data providers, thus leading to significant privacy
issues. Differential privacy (DP) is the predominant solution for
privacy-preserving ML, and the local model of DP is the preferred choice when
the server or the data collector are not trusted. Recent experimental studies
have shown that local DP can impact ML prediction for different subgroups of
individuals, thus affecting fair decision-making. However, the results are
conflicting in the sense that some studies show a positive impact of privacy on
fairness while others show a negative one. In this work, we conduct a
systematic and formal study of the effect of local DP on fairness.
Specifically, we perform a quantitative study of how the fairness of the
decisions made by the ML model changes under local DP for different levels of
privacy and data distributions. In particular, we provide bounds in terms of
the joint distributions and the privacy level, delimiting the extent to which
local DP can impact the fairness of the model. We characterize the cases in
which privacy reduces discrimination and those with the opposite effect. We
validate our theoretical findings on synthetic and real-world datasets. Our
results are preliminary in the sense that, for now, we study only the case of
one sensitive attribute, and only statistical disparity, conditional
statistical disparity, and equal opportunity difference.