Exploring the impact of fairness-aware criteria in AutoML
Researchers demonstrate that integrating fairness metrics directly into AutoML optimization improves algorithmic fairness by 14.5% while reducing data usage by 35.7%, though at the cost of a 9.4% decrease in predictive accuracy. This study challenges the industry standard of prioritizing performance over fairness and shows that simpler, fairer ML models can achieve practical balance without requiring complex architectures.