Which Demographic Features Are Relevant for Individual Fairness Evaluation of U.S. Recidivism Risk Assessment Tools?

Despite its U.S. constitutional foundation, the technical ``individual fairness'' criterion has not been operationalized in state or federal statutes/regulations. We conduct a human subjects experiment to address this gap, evaluating which demographic features are relevant for individual fairness evaluation of recidivism risk assessment (RRA) tools. Our analyses conclude that the individual similarity function should consider age and sex, but it should ignore race.

@article{nguyen2025_2505.09868,
  title={ Which Demographic Features Are Relevant for Individual Fairness Evaluation of U.S. Recidivism Risk Assessment Tools? },
  author={ Tin Trung Nguyen and Jiannan Xu and Phuong-Anh Nguyen-Le and Jonathan Lazar and Donald Braman and Hal Daumé III and Zubin Jelveh },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09868},
  year={ 2025 }
}