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Everything, including income, is eventually correlated with race. The point I was making counters "does not matter how, just the outcome matters": The model dis
by BickNowstrom 7y ago
Everything, including income, is eventually correlated with race. The point I was making counters "does not matter how, just the outcome matters": The model disapproved you not because you are black, but because you have a low income. There is societal racism there that needs addressing with policy and regulation, not by handicapping your model by throwing away non-protected variables. The -perfectly legal-outcome will be that fewer people of color receive a loan.
I know that you can't use just any old variable, but I tried enough to know that music genre would probably be an informative feature (dibs on providing loans to classical - and Judeo-Christian religious music lovers, you are free to underwrite the dubstep - and ghetto rap fans).
- TheCoelacanth 7y agoMusic preferences undoubtedly would be correlated with risk. You still can't use them because of disparate impact. To get away with making a decision in a way that has disparate impact, you need to have a legitimate need to be making the decision that way. In the case of income, you can justify needing to use it in your decision, because income is directly connected to ability to repay. In the case of music preferences, you can't, because there is no direct connection to loan risk.