Fairness is not static: deeper understanding of long term fairness via simulation studies

As machine learning becomes increasingly incorporated within high impact decision ecosystems, there is a growing need to understand the long-term behaviors of deployed ML-based decision systems and their potential consequences. Most approaches to understanding or improving the fairness of these systems have focused on static settings without considering long-term dynamics. This is understandable; long term dynamics are hard to assess, particularly because they do not align with the traditional supervised ML research framework that uses fixed data sets. To address this structural difficulty in the field, we advocate for the use of simulation as a key tool in studying the fairness of algorithms. We explore three toy examples of dynamical systems that have been previously studied in the context of fair decision making for bank loans, college admissions, and allocation of attention. By analyzing how learning agents interact with these systems in simulation, we are able to extend previous work, showing that static or single-step analyses do not give a complete picture of the long-term consequences of an ML-based decision system. We provide an extensible open-source software framework for implementing fairness-focused simulation studies and further reproducible research, available at https://github.com/google/ml-fairness-gym.