The Importance Of Algorithmic Fairness

The discourse around algorithm fairness has garnered increasing attention throughout the insurance industry.

As the use of machine learning has become more common, from marketing and underwriting to claims management, regulators and consumer rights organisations have raised questions about the ethical risks posed by such technology.

A catalyst of this social discourse was an article titled Machine Bias published by the investigative news organization ProPublica.

The paper focused criticism on a law case management and decision support tool used in the U.S. judicial system called Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, or COMPAS.

A conclusion of the academic research surrounding this debate is that there are competing definitions of fairness, and these definitions may be incompatible with one another.