Is it Possible to Characterize Group Fairness in Rankings in Terms of Individual Fairness and Diversity?

Abstract

Rankings are ever-present in everyday life. Examples are the results of personalized recommendations and web search queries. Rankings can result from an algorithm, importance scores and human-based rankings of items. Till we are not concerned with societal applications, the “fairness“ of the ranking is often irrelevant; however, problems appear when switching from depersonalized items to individuals. Then, suddenly, fairness becomes an issue. We investigate the relationships among group fairness, individual fairness, diversity, and Shapley values. Far from being a comprehensive survey of fairness-related papers or proposing a new method, we want to raise awareness of the chaos we are trying to navigate and propose some new research direction we are trying to follow.