  In this paper, we propose a new framework for mitigating biases in machine
learning systems. The problem of the existing mitigation approaches is that
they are model-oriented in the sense that they focus on tuning the training
algorithms to produce fair results, while overlooking the fact that the
training data can itself be the main reason for biased outcomes. Technically
speaking, two essential limitations can be found in such model-based
approaches: 1) the mitigation cannot be achieved without degrading the accuracy
of the machine learning models, and 2) when the data used for training are
largely biased, the training time automatically increases so as to find
suitable learning parameters that help produce fair results. To address these
shortcomings, we propose in this work a new framework that can largely mitigate
the biases and discriminations in machine learning systems while at the same
time enhancing the prediction accuracy of these systems. The proposed framework
is based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs), which are used
to generate new synthetic fair data with selective properties from the original
data. We also propose a framework for analyzing data biases, which is important
for understanding the amount and type of data that need to be synthetically
sampled and labeled for each population group. Experimental results show that
the proposed solution can efficiently mitigate different types of biases, while
at the same time enhancing the prediction accuracy of the underlying machine
learning model.
