RESEARCH ARTICLE SOCIAL SCIENCES OPEN ACCESS

Eliminating unintended bias in personalized policies using

bias-eliminating adapted trees (BEAT)
Eva Ascarzaa,1 and Ayelet Israelia,1

Edited by Elke Weber, Departments of Psychology & Public Affairs, Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;
received August 19, 2021; accepted December 26, 2021

An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individ-

uals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics, such as gender or race), even Significance
when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”
attributes. This unintended discrimination is often caused by underlying correlations in Decision makers now use
the data between protected attributes and other observed characteristics used by the al- algorithmic personalization for
gorithm to create predictions and target individuals optimally. Because these correlations resource allocation decisions in
are hidden in high-dimensional data, removing protected attributes from the database many domains (e.g., medical
does not solve the discrimination problem; instead, removing those attributes often treatments, hiring decisions,
exacerbates the problem by making it undetectable and in some cases, even increases the product recommendations, or
bias generated by the algorithm. We propose BEAT (bias-eliminating adapted trees) to dynamic pricing). An inherent risk
address these issues. This approach allows decision makers to target individuals based on of personalization is
differences in their predicted behavior—hence, capturing value from personalization—
disproportionate targeting of
while ensuring a balanced allocation of resources across individuals, guaranteeing both
individuals from certain protected
group and individual fairness. Essentially, the method only extracts heterogeneity in the
data that is unrelated to protected attributes. To do so, we build on the general random groups. Existing solutions that
forest (GRF) framework [S. Athey et al., Ann. Stat. 47, 1148–1178 (2019)] and develop firms use to avoid this bias often
a targeting allocation that is “balanced” with respect to protected attributes. We validate do not eliminate the bias and may
BEAT using simulations and an online experiment with N = 3,146 participants. This even exacerbate it. We propose
approach can be applied to any type of allocation decision that is based on prediction BEAT (bias-eliminating adapted
algorithms, such as medical treatments, hiring decisions, product recommendations, or trees) to ensure balanced
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dynamic pricing. allocation of resources across

individuals—guaranteeing both
algorithmic bias | personalization | targeting | fairness | discrimination
group and individual
fairness—while still leveraging the
In the era of algorithmic personalization, resources are often allocated based on individual-
value of personalization. We
level predictive models. For example, financial institutions allocate loans based on in-
dividuals’ expected risk of default, advertisers display ads based on users’ likelihood to validate our method using
respond to the ad, hospitals allocate organs to patients based on their chances to survive, simulations as well as an online
and marketers allocate price discounts based on customers’ propensity to respond to experiment with N = 3,146
such promotions. The rationale behind these practices is to leverage differences across participants. BEAT is easy to
individuals, such that a desired outcome can be optimized via personalized or targeted implement in practice, has
interventions. For example, a financial institution would reduce risk of default by desirable scalability properties,
approving loans to individuals with the lowest risk of defaulting, advertisers would increase and is applicable to many
profits when targeting ads to users who are most likely to respond to those ads, and so personalization problems.
forth.
There are, however, individual differences that firms may not want to leverage for
personalization, as they might lead to disproportionate allocation to a specific group. These Author affiliations: a Marketing Unit, Harvard Business
individual differences may include gender, race, sexual orientation, or other protected School, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02163

attributes. In fact, several countries have instituted laws against discrimination based on
protected attributes in certain domains (e.g., in voting rights, employment, education, and
housing). However, discrimination in other domains is lawful but is often still perceived as Author contributions: E.A. and A.I. designed research,
unfair or unacceptable (1). For example, it is widely accepted that ride-sharing companies performed research, contributed new analytic tools,
analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
set higher prices during peak hours, but these companies were criticized when their prices
The authors declare no competing interest.
were found to be systematically higher in non-White neighborhoods compared with White
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
areas (2).
Copyright © 2022 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
Intuitively, a potentially attractive solution to this broad concern of protected This open access article is distributed under Creative
attributes–based discrimination may be to remove the protected attributes from the data Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
and to generate a personalized allocation policy based on the predictions obtained from License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
1
models trained using only the unprotected attributes. However, such an approach would To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email:
eascarza@hbs.edu or aisraeli@hbs.edu.
not solve the problem as there might be other variables remaining in the dataset that are
This article contains supporting information online at
related to the protected attributes and therefore, will still generate bias. Interestingly, as https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.
we show in our empirical section, there are cases in which removing protected attributes 2115293119/-/DCSupplemental.
from the data can actually increase the degree of discrimination on the protected attributes Published March 8, 2022.

PNAS 2022 Vol. 119 No. 11 e2115293119 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115293119 1 of 9

 (i.e., a firm that chooses to exclude protected attributes from
its database might create a greater imbalance). This finding is
particularly relevant today because companies are increasingly
announcing their plans to stop using protected attributes in fear of
engaging in discrimination practices. In our empirical section, we
show the conditions under which this finding applies in practice.
Personalized allocation algorithms typically use data as input
to a two-stage model. First, the data are used to predict accu-
rate outcomes based on the observed variables in the data (the
“inference” stage). Then, these predictions are used to create an
optimal targeting policy with a particular objective function in
mind (the “allocation” stage). The (typically unintended) biases
in the policies might occur because the protected attributes are
often correlated with the predicted outcomes. Thus, using either
the protected attributes themselves or variables that are correlated
with those protected attributes in the inference stage may generate
a biased allocation policy.*
This biased personalization problem could be in principle
solved using constrained optimization, focusing on the allocation
stage of the algorithm (e.g., refs. 3 and 4). Using this approach,
a constraint is added to the optimization problem such that
individuals who are allocated to receive treatment (the “targeted”
group) are not systematically different in their protected attributes
from those who do not receive treatment. Although methods
for constrained optimization problems often work well in low
dimensions, they are sensitive to the curse of dimensionality (e.g.,
if there are multiple protected attributes).
Another option would be to focus on the data that are fed to
the algorithm and “debias” the data before they are used: that
is, transform the unprotected variables such that they become
independent of the protected attributes and use the resulting
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data in the two-stage model (e.g., refs. 5 and 6). While doing
so guarantees pairwise independence of each variable from the
protected attributes, it is difficult to account for underlying depen-
dencies between the protected attributes and interactions of the
different variables (6). Most importantly, while these methods are
generally effective at achieving group fairness (statistical parity),
they often harm individual fairness (7–9).† Finally, debiasing
methods require the decision maker to collect protected attributes
at all times, both when estimating the optimal policy and when
applying that policy to new individuals. A more desired approach
would be to create a mapping between unprotected attributes and
policy allocations that not only is fair (both at the group level and
at the individual level) but can also be applied without the need
to collect protected attributes for new individuals.
In this paper, we depart from those approaches and propose
an approach that addresses the potential bias at the inference
stage (rather than pre- or postprocessing the data or adding
constraints to the allocation). Our focus is to infer an object of
interest—“conditional balanced targetability” (CBT)—that mea-
sures the adjusted treatment effect predictions, conditional on
a set of unprotected variables. Essentially, we create a mapping
from unprotected attributes to a continuous targetability score
that leads to balanced allocation of resources with respect to the
protected attributes. Previous papers that modified the inference
stage (e.g., refs. 10–14) are limited in their applicability because
they typically require additional assumptions and restrictions and
are limited in the type of classifiers they apply to. The benefits of
* Notethat algorithmic bias may also occur due to unrepresentative or biased data. This
paper focuses on bias that is created due to underlying correlations in the data.
†
Statistical parity ensures that the distribution of protected groups is similar between the
treated and nontreated groups. Individual fairness ensures that individuals of different
protected groups that have the same value of unprotected attributes are treated equally.
2 of 9 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115293119
our approach are noteworthy. First, allocating resources based on
CBT scores does, by design, achieve both group and individual
fairness. Second, we leverage computationally efficient methods
for inference that are easy to implement in practice and also have
desirable scalability properties. Third, out-of-sample predictions
for CBT do not require protected attributes as an input. In other
words, firms or institutions seeking allocation decisions that do
not discriminate on protected attributes only need to collect the
protected attributes when calibrating the model. Once the model
is estimated, future allocation decisions can be based on (out-of-
sample) predictions, which only require the unprotected attributes
of the new individuals.
We propose a practical solution where the decision maker can
leverage the value of personalization without the risk of dispro-
portionately targeting individuals based on protected attributes.
The solution, which we name BEAT (bias-eliminating adapted
trees), generates individual-level predictions that are independent
of any preselected protected attributes. Our approach builds on
general random forests (GRFs) (15, 16), which are designed to
efficiently estimate heterogeneous outcomes. Our method pre-
serves most of the core elements of GRF, including the use of
forests as a type of adaptive nearest neighbor estimator and the use
of gradient-based approximations to specify the tree-split point.
Importantly, we depart from GRF in how we select the optimal
split for partitioning. Rather than using divergence between chil-
dren nodes as the primary objective of any partition, the BEAT
algorithm combines two objectives—heterogeneity in the out-
come of interest and homogeneity in the protected attributes—
when choosing the optimal split. Essentially, the BEAT method
only identifies individual differences in the outcome of interest
(e.g., heterogeneity in response to price) that are homogeneously
distributed in the protected attributes (e.g., race). As a result, not
only the protected attributes will be equally distributed across
policy allocations (group fairness), but the method will also ensure
that individuals with the same unprotected attributes would have
the same allocation (individual fairness).
Using a variety of simulated scenarios, we show that our
method exhibits promising empirical performance. Specifically,
BEAT reduces the unintended bias while leveraging the value of
personalized targeting. Further, BEAT allows the decision maker
to quantify the trade-off between performance and discrimina-
tion. We also examine the conditions under which the intuitive
approach of removing protected attributes from the data alleviates
or increases the bias. Finally, we apply our solution to a market-
ing context in which a firm decides which customers to target
with a discount coupon. Using an online sample of n = 3,146
participants, we find strong evidence of relationships between
“protected” and “unprotected” attributes in real data. Moreover,
applying personalized targeting to these data leads to significant
bias against a protected group (in our case, older populations)
due to these underlying correlations. Finally, we demonstrate that
BEAT mitigates the bias, generating a balanced targeting policy
that does not discriminate against individuals based on protected
attributes.
Our contribution fits broadly into the vast literature on fairness
and algorithmic bias (e.g., refs. 2 and 17–22). Most of this
literature has focused on uncovering biases and their causes as well
as on conceptualizing the algorithmic bias problem and potential
solutions for researchers and practitioners. We complement this
literature by providing a practical solution that prevents algo-
rithmic bias that is caused by underlying correlations. Our work
also builds on the growing literature on treatment personaliza-
tion (e.g., refs. 23–28). This literature has mainly focused on
the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects and designing
pnas.org
 A B C D E F
0.4 Protected 0 1
2 2 2 2

0.3 1 1 1 1 0.8

0.6
0.2 0 0 0 0

0.4
−1 −1 −1 −1
0.1
0.2
−2 −2 −2 −2
0.0 0.0
−2 0 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 0 2
Predicted CATE X1 X2 (corr. Z1) X3 X4 Target score

Fig. 1. Estimated CATE using GRF including protected and unprotected attributes. A shows the distribution of CATE; B–E show the relationships between
unprotected characteristics X1 through X4 (x axis), respectively, and predicted CATE (y axis); and F shows the distribution of CATE by different values of the
protected attribute Z1 .

targeting rules accordingly, but it has largely ignored any fairness
or discrimination considerations in the allocation of treatment.
Illustrative Example
We begin with a simulated example to illustrate how algorithmic
personalization can create unintended biases. Consider a mar-
keting context in which a firm runs an experiment to decide
which customers should receive the treatment (e.g., coupon) in the
future. That is, the results of the experiment will determine which
customers are most likely to be impacted by future treatment.
We recreate this situation by simulating the behavior of N =
10, 000 + 5, 000 (train and test) individuals. We use Yi ∈ R to
denote the outcome (e.g., profitability) of individual i, Zi ∈ RD
to denote the vector of protected attributes (e.g., race, gender),
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with highest predicted CATE (τ˜i ). We use GRF as developed
in ref. 16 to estimate the model and present the results (on test
data) in Fig. 1. Fig. 1A shows the distribution of τ˜i across the
population, showing a rich variation across individuals. Fig. 1 B–E
presents the marginal effect of each of the variables X1 through
X4 on τ˜i . GRF captures the true relationships (or lack thereof )
between the observables and the treatment effect very well. At first
glance, the relationship shown in Fig. 1C is surprising given that,
by construction, X2 does not impact τ˜i . However, the correlation
between Z1 and X2 causes this indirect relationship, which is
revealed in Fig. 1.
Evidence of “unintended bias” is presented in Fig. 1F, where
we plot the distribution of τ˜i by the different values of the binary
protected attribute Z1 .¶ It clearly shows the systematic difference
in treatment effect between customers with Zi1 = 0 and Zi1 = 1,

Xi ∈ RK to denote the set of unprotected variables that the firm
has collected about the individual (e.g., past purchases, channel
of acquisition), and Wi ∈ [0, 1] to denote whether customer i
has received the treatment.‡ We generate individual-level data as
follows:
Xik ∼ Normal (0, 1) for k ∈ {1, . . . , 4},
Xik ∼ Bernoulli (0.3) for k ∈ {5, . . . , 10},
 
Zid ∼ Bernoulli (1 + e −6Xi2 )−1 for d = 1,
Zid ∼ Normal (0, 1) for d ∈ {2, . . . , 3},
Zid ∼ Bernoulli (0.3) for d = 4,
and we simulate individual behavior following the process
Y i = τi W i +   ∼ Normal (0, 1),
τi = max(Xi1 , 0) − 0.5Xi3 + Zi1 .
The main patterns to highlight are that the protected attribute
Xi2 and Zi1 are positively correlated; that individuals respond
differently to treatment depending on Xi1 , Xi3 , and Zi1 ; and that
all other variables have no (direct) impact on the treatment effect
(τi ) or on the outcome of interest (Yi ).§
Case 1: Maximizing Outcomes. A firm maximizing the outcome
(Yi ) via allocation of treatment Wi would estimate τi , the
conditional average treatment effect (CATE), as a function of the
observables Xi and Zi and would allocate treatment to the units
‡ because they do not impact τi or Yi .
For simplicity, we consider a single allocation decision: yes/no. This can easily be extended
to multiple treatment assignments.
§ and statistics.
In generating the data, we normalize τi to be centered at zero and have SD of one across
the population. That way, the degree of heterogeneity is comparable across scenarios
where we vary the functional form of τi (Table 2).
causing a disproportional representation of customers with Zi1 =
1 in the targeted group. For example, if the firm was to target
50% of its customers in decreasing order of τ˜i , 12 times more
individuals with Z = 1 would be targeted compared with Z = 0
individuals (i.e., the ratio is 12:1), and the outcome would be
81% higher than that obtained from an average random policy.
Specifically, to compute the relative outcome, we compute the
inverse probability score (IPS) estimator of the outcome generated
by each allocation policy in the test data if the firm was to
target 50% of the population. We then normalize this metric
with respect to the outcome generated by a random allocation,
such that 0% corresponds to the outcome if the firm did not
leverage any personalization. (We chose a fixed proportion of
individuals to be targeted [i.e., 50%] to keep the “cost” of the
intervention constant across scenarios. Our results are robust to
choosing different levels of targeting.# )
Finally, to explore the degree of individual fairness of the policy,
we compute the fraction of individuals for whom the allocation
would change had their protected attributes been different. This
metric, which we denote as Δ Policy, is inspired by ref. 9. Essen-
tially, for each individual, we compare their allocation with that
of their “almost identical twin” who is identical in all unprotected
attributes but different on the protected attributes.|| We find that
Δ Policy = 83%, meaning that 83% of individuals would have
been assigned to a different policy allocation had their protected
attributes be different.
¶
In the interest of space, we do not report treatment effects or allocations for Z2 to Z4
#
The IPS (29) is a popular metric for policy counterfactual evaluation in computer science
||
For binary attributes, we simply flip attribute Z by using 1 − Z. For continuous attributes,
we first standardize the data, and then, we move it by ±1 SD.

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 A B C D E F
Protected 0 1
0.4 2 2 2 2

0.3 1 1 1 1
0.6
0 0 0 0
0.2
0.4
−1 −1 −1 −1
0.1 0.2
−2 −2 −2 −2
0.0 0.0
−2 0 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 0 2
Predicted CATE X1 X2 (corr. Z1) X3 X4 Target score

Fig. 2. Estimated CATE using GRF including unprotected attributes only. A shows the distribution of CATE; B–E show the relationships between unprotected
characteristics X1 through X4 (x axis) , respectively, and predicted CATE (y axis); and F shows the distribution of CATE by different values of the protected
attribute Z1 .

Case 2: Maximizing Outcomes and Removing Protected At-
tributes. A firm might try to avoid discrimination by removing
protected attributes from the data. Naturally, Δ Policy = 0 in this
case because the protected variables are excluded from the whole
analysis, and therefore, a change in protected attributes would not
change the policy allocation. To recreate that scenario, we replicate
the analysis in case 1, but we exclude all Z variables from the policy
analysis. The results are presented in Fig. 2 and are remarkably
similar to those in which protected attributes are used. We direct
attention to Fig. 2F, which shows the persistent systematic differ-
ences between individuals with Z1 = 1 and Z1 = 0, even when
protected attributes Z were excluded from the estimation. Here,
the presence of X2 causes the unbalanced targeting, which in this
case, translates to a ratio of 5:1 and an increase of 71% with respect
to the average random policy.
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policy. Although Fig. 3 B and D shows a clear relationship between
the unprotected attributes and CBT, Fig. 3C highlights that the
proposed algorithm does not capture differences by unprotected
variables (in this case, X2 ) that lead to bias in targeting.
Finally, looking at Fig. 3A, the distribution of CBT is narrower
than those obtained for CATE in Figs. 1A and 2A. This is a direct
result of how BEAT leverages heterogeneity. Because the algorithm
only extracts differences that are unrelated to protected attributes,
it naturally captures less variability in the outcome of interest than
other algorithms that are designed to achieve the single objective
of exploring heterogeneity. Accordingly, the outcome in case 3 is
lower than in the previous cases.
Regarding individual fairness, even though BEAT incorporates
Z in the analysis—to ensure a balanced targetability—the method
is designed such that the CBT scores do not depend on the

protected attributes and therefore, will always achieve individual

Case 3: Maximizing Outcomes and Balance Jointly. We propose
to pursue both objectives jointly by using BEAT. The key idea
of our approach is to be selective about which differences in the
data are “usable” for policy allocation. For example, even though
empirically, there is a relationship between (τ˜i ) and Xi2 , BEAT
will not leverage individual differences on X2 when estimating
the targetability scores because that would necessarily lead to un-
balanced targeting with respect to Z1 . Importantly, our approach
does not require the user to know which unprotected variables are
related to the protected attributes or the shape and strength of
those relationships. Instead, it captures any kind of relationship
between them. The only information that the user needs a priori
is the identity of the attributes that are meant to be protected.
Fig. 3 shows the results of using BEAT. Starting from Fig. 3F,
it is remarkable how the distribution of CBT is almost identical
for the different values of Z1 , showing BEAT’s ability to produce
balanced outcomes. The ratio of targeted individuals by Z1 is 1:1,
and the outcome is a 44% increase over that of the average random
fairness (i.e., Δ Policy = 0).
Methods
Overview. The primary goal of BEAT is to identify (observed) heterogeneity
across individuals that is unrelated to their protected attributes. That hetero-
geneity is then used to implement targeted allocations that are, by construction,
balanced on the protected attributes. Furthermore, we want our method to be
as general as possible, covering a wide variety of personalization tasks. In the
illustrative example, we were interested in identifying differences in the effect of
a treatment Wi on an outcome Yi . This is commonly the case for personalized
medicine, targeted firm interventions, or personalized advertising. In other cases
(e.g., approving a loan based on the probability of default), the goal would be
to extract heterogeneity on the outcome itself, Yi (e.g., Yi indicates whether the
individual will default in the future).
We build on GRFs (15, 16), which are designed to efficiently estimate hetero-
geneous outcomes. Generally speaking, GRF uses forests as a type of adaptive
nearest neighbor estimator and achieves efficiency by using gradient-based
approximations to specify the tree-split point. (Ref. 16 has details on the method,

A B C D E F
Protected 0 1
2 2 2 2
0.6
1 1 1 1
0.6
0.4 0 0 0 0
0.4
0.2 −1 −1 −1 −1
0.2
−2 −2 −2 −2
0.0 0.0
−2 0 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 −1 0 1 2 −2 0 2
Predicted CBT X1 X2 (corr. Z1) X3 X4 Target score

Fig. 3. Estimated CBT using BEAT. A shows the distribution of CBT; B–E show the relationships between unprotected characteristics X1 through X4 (x axis),
respectively, and predicted CBT (y axis); and F shows the distribution of CBT by different values of the protected attribute Z1 .

4 of 9 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115293119 pnas.org
 Fig. 4. Efficiency/balance trade-off for an illustrative example. Efficiency is the proportion increase in outcome compared with random allocation. Imbalance
is the Euclidean distance between the average value of the protected attribute (Z1 ) in treated and nontreated units of each policy. We compare CF-FD, causal
forest (CF) without the protected attributes, and BEAT with 0 ≤ γ ≤ 5. Select values of γ are reported.
and https://github.com/grf-labs/grf has details on its implementation.) The key
difference between GRF and our method is the objective when partitioning
the data to build the trees (and therefore, forests). Rather than maximizing
divergence in the object of interest (either treatment effect heterogeneity for the
causal forest or the outcome variable for prediction forests) between the children
nodes, BEAT maximizes a quantity we define as balanced divergence (BD), which
combines the divergence of the outcome of interest (object from GRF) with a
penalized distance between the empirical distribution of the protected attributes
across the children nodes.
Specifically, in the BEAT algorithm, trees are formed by sequentially finding
the split that maximizes the BD object:
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¯ ¯
BD(C1 , C2 ) = Δ̂(C1 , C2 ) − γDist(ZC1 |Xk,s , ZC2 |Xk,s ),
      BEAT while setting γ = 0 would yield exactly the same outcomes as running
GRF split
criterion
BEAT added penalty
where C1 and C2 denote the children nodes in each split s; Δ̂(C1 , C2 ) denotes
the divergence in the outcome of interest (as defined in equation 9 in ref. 16;
for brevity, we refer to the notation and expressions introduced in ref. 16); γ
is a nonnegative scalar denoting the balance penalty, which can be adjusted
by the researcher (a trade-off discussion is given below); Dist is a distance
function (e.g., Euclidean norm); and Xk,s is the splitting point for C1 and C2
at dimension k ∈ K.** When selecting splits to build a tree, ref. 16 optimizes the
first term of Eq. 1, indicated with “GRF split criterion,” and BEAT essentially adds
a second term to the equation, introducing a penalty when there are differences
in the Z attributes between the children nodes. Therefore, maximizing BD when
sequentially splitting the data ensures that all resulting trees (and hence, forests)
are balanced with respect to the protected attributes Z.
Once trees are grown by maximizing Eq. 1, we proceed exactly as GRF and
use the trees to calculate the similarity weights used to estimate the object of
interest. More formally, indexing the trees by b = 1, . . . , B and defining a leaf
Lb (x) as the set of training observations falling in the same leaf as x, we calculate
balanced weights α̃bi (x) as the frequency with which the ith observation falls
into the same leaf as x, and we calculate the CBT score by combining the weights
and the local estimate of the quantity estimated by GRF (i.e., the treatment
effect heterogeneity [τi ] for causal forest or expected outcome variable [μi ] for
prediction forests). For example, in the simplest case of prediction forest, we can
express the CBT score as

N sufficient efficiency.
CBT(x) = α̃i (x)μ̂i ,
i=1
** To gain efficiency when computing  ¯
ZCc |Xk,s in each child c, we preprocess the data. First,
we split Xk into 256 equal bins and subtract the average of  Z within the bin. Then, we take
¯
the average of Z for each splitting point X and child node c to obtain 
k,s Z |X . Cc k,s
PNAS 2022 Vol. 119 No. 11 e2115293119
B 1
where α̃i (x) = b=1 α̃b (x) and μ̂i is the leave-one-out estimator for
B i
E [Yi | Xi = x].
Note that the only difference between the CBT scores provided by BEAT and
the estimates provided by GRF are the similarity weights, whereby α̃bi (x) (from
BEAT) are balanced with respect to Z and αbi (x) from GRF do not depend on Z.
For the special case in which variables X and Z are independent, maximizing Eq.
1 corresponds to maximizing Δ̂(C1 , C2 ), exactly as GRF does, and therefore,
CBTi (x) from Eq. 2 corresponds to the outcome of GRF, τ̂ (x) for causal forests
and μ̂(x) for regression forests.
Efficiency/Balance Trade-Off. The penalty parameter γ in Eq. 1 determines
how much weight the algorithm gives to balance in protected attributes. Running
[1]
GRF without protected attributes. As γ increases, the imbalance in the protected
attributes would be reduced, but the main outcome to optimize may be lower
as well. Naturally, introducing an additional constraint in contexts where bias
exists would necessarily reduce efficiency while improving fairness. Because the
penalty parameter in BEAT is flexible,one can easily explore the efficiency/fairness
trade-off of any particular context by adjusting the value of γ. Fig. 4 illustrates this
trade-off using the illustrative example.
The y axis in the figure represents the efficiency of each method measured as
the value obtained by personalization compared with the average random policy
as described above, while the x axis captures the imbalance in protected attribute
Z1 , which is the overallocation proportion of Z1 = 1.
As illustrated by the example, when using the causal forest (CF) with the full
data (namely, CF-FD: CF with full data; case 1 above), both the outcome and
imbalance are the highest: at 81% over random and 0.69, respectively. Using a
causal forest without the protected attributes (case 2 above) yields lower results
for both axes: 71% and 0.42, respectively. Finally, the red line captures the
performance of BEAT when using different penalty weights γ and so, captures
the efficiency/balance trade-off in this particular example. If one sets γ = 0, the
outcome is identical to that of case 2. Then, as γ increases (γ is increased by
0.05 intervals in the figure), there is a reduction in both outcome and imbalance,
getting to a minimum outcome of 44% when imbalance is reduced all the
way to zero.†† Note that the relationship between efficiency and balance in this
example is not linear—for values of γ ∈ [1.1, 1.25], BEAT can reduce imbalance
significantly without sacrificing too much efficiency. This gives the decision maker
a degree of freedom to allow a certain amount of imbalance while ensuring
[2]
Simulation. We validate the effectiveness of BEAT by simulating a large variety
of scenarios (SI Appendix, Table S1 shows the full set of results). Table 1 presents
††
Note that setting γ to values greater than 1.35 does not reduce the efficiency of the
method, with 44% being the lowest outcome obtained by the BEAT method.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115293119 5 of 9
 Table 1. Simulated scenarios: Comparing outcomes across methods
Method Scenario 1 ↑ corr.; Scenario 2 ↓ corr.;
τ = f (Z), % τ = f (Z), %
Efficiency Imbalance Δ Policy Efficiency Imbalance Δ Policy Efficiency Imbalance Δ Policy Efficiency Imbalance Δ Policy
CF-FD 81.2 100.0 82.8 78.7 100.0
CF-NP 71.1 60.8 0.0 50.8 5.6
Debiased 45.8 0.3 13.5 43.0 0.1
BEAT∗ 44.5 0.1 0.0 42.1 0.1
Results comparing CF-FD, CF-NP, debiased, and BEAT are reported. Debiased uses regression forests to debias the data. Additional benchmarks are reported in SI Appendix
(SI Appendix, Table S1). corr. indicates correlation, and the corresponding arrow sign indicates whether there is high or low correlation between Z and X2 . Efficiency is measured as
the percentage increase in outcome over random allocation. Imbalance is normalized to 100% for the imbalance obtained with CF-FD (e.g., column 2 of scenario 1 should be read CF-NP
generates 60.8% of the imbalance obtained when using the full data). Δ Policy measures the percentage of individuals for whom the outcome would change if their protected attributes
were different.
∗
Scalar γ is set to a large number, yielding the most conservative estimates for efficiency and imbalance.
a subset of results that illustrate BEAT’s performance compared with other
personalization methods. Scenario 1 in Table 1 presents the illustrative example.
Then, in scenario 2, we use this baseline example and reduce the strength of the
relationship between the protected attributes (Z) and the unprotected attributes
(X2 ). In scenarios 3 and 4, we further vary the empirical relationship between
(X2 , Z) and the variable of interest (τ ). Specifically, we allow both (X2 , Z) to
directly affect τ , either with the same or the opposite sign. The table compares
the performance of BEAT and other approaches, including running GRF with and
without the protected attributes (cases 1 and 2 above) and running GRF using
debiased data X  , with X  = X − fx (Z) with fx being a (multivariate) random
forest with X as outcome variables and Z as features.
These scenarios illustrate several important patterns that highlight the ben-
efits of BEAT compared with existing solutions. First, when the unprotected
attributes do not directly impact the variable of interest (scenarios 1 and 2),
debiasing the X’s works almost as well as BEAT—the imbalance is completely
removed. However, debiasing also suffers from individual fairness bias compared
with BEAT. Second, comparing scenarios 1 and 2, when the correlation between
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the protected and unprotected attributes is relatively low, GRF without protected
characteristics (which we name CF-NP: a CF with no protected attributes) is
almost as effective as BEAT and debiasing in removing the imbalance. Third,
once the correlated variables impact the variable of interest directly (scenarios
3 and 4), debiasing is almost as effective as BEAT in removing the imbalance,
but the individual fairness bias becomes worse. Further, when both unprotected
and protected attributes impact the variable of interest but with opposite signs
(scenario 4),removing protected attributes yields more imbalance compared with
the baseline approach that uses all the data. From a practical point of view, this
insight is relevant because firms and organizations are increasingly eliminating
protected attributes from their databases (or are pressured to do so). Our analysis
shows that doing so could make things worse as there are cases when removing
protected attributes increases—rather than decreases—the imbalance between
protected and unprotected groups.
Experiment. We demonstrate the real-world applicability of our method us-
ing experimental data. As highlighted in Table 1, the imbalance in outcomes
depends on the strength of the relationships between protected and unpro-
tected attributes as well as the underlying relationships between observables
and outcomes. Therefore, the goal of this analysis is twofold: 1) investigate
the extent to which underlying correlations between protected and unprotected
characteristics occur in real-world data and 2) explore whether those underlying
relationships lead to imbalance against a protected group (if so, demonstrate
how BEAT mitigates the imbalance and generates balanced outcomes when those
relationships are ingrained in high-dimensional data, as is the case in most real
applications).
To that end, we ran an incentive compatible online experiment where 3,146
participants were randomly assigned to different conditions of a marketing cam-
paign akin to a situation where some participants were offered a $5 discount and
others were not (SI Appendix, section 2 has details). Participants were asked to
make a subsequent choice of buying from the company that offered the coupon or
the competitor. In addition, we collected behavioral and self-reported measures
about each participant (e.g., brand preferences, attitudes toward social issues,
behavior in social media sites) as well as demographic characteristics, which are
generally considered as protected attributes (age, gender, and race), to explore
6 of 9 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115293119
Scenario 3 ↓ corr.; Scenario 4 ↓ corr.;
τ = f (Z, X2 ), % τ = f (Z, −X2 ), %
82.6 74.6 100.0 28.8 76.3 100.0 1.6
0.0 71.8 30.3 0.0 76.7 112.0 0.0
8.9 59.9 0.6 24.3 75.0 0.8 26.7
0.0 44.8 0.1 0.0 45.4 0.5 0.0
the underlying correlations between unprotected and protected attributes and
the relationship between these variables and the choice outcome. All materials
were reviewed and approved by Harvard University’s Institutional Review Board,
and all participants provided informed consent. The experiment materials and
the results are available in the SI Appendix.
First, we explore the correlations between the protected attributes and other
customer variables, for which we run a set of (univariate) regressions of each
protected attribute on the (unprotected) variables. To illustrate the correlations,
we report this analysis for the “activity” variables.‡‡ Specifically, we use linear
regression for age and logistic regressions for gender (coded as nonmale) and
race (coded as non-White).
Fig. 5 shows the coefficients from those regressions, revealing that many of
the unprotected attributes predict the ones that are protected. Note that most of
these activity-related variables capture very “seemingly innocent” behaviors,such
as how frequently one cooks their own meals or uses a dating app, behaviors
that are easily captured by information regularly collected by firms (e.g., past
browsing activity). Importantly, the fact that these relationships commonly occur
in real life implies that, in cases where personalization leads to imbalance in the
protected attributes, simply removing those attributes from the data will not be
enough to mitigate such a bias.
Second, we explore what would have happened if the focal company used
these data to design personalized marketing policies. Specifically, we are in-
terested in exploring whether a profit-maximizing marketing campaign would
lead to unbalanced policies (in the protected attributes) and if so, how much
bias would still remain even when those attributes are removed from the data.
Furthermore, we want to explore the performance of BEAT on the (real-world)
marketing example and demonstrate how BEAT can mitigate that unintended
bias. Accordingly, we analyze our experimental data by emulating what a firm
designing targeted campaigns would do in practice (26, 27, 30). Specifically, we
randomly split the data into train and test samples and use the training data to
learn the optimal policy under each approach. This corresponds to a firm running
an experiment (or a pilot test) among a subset of users to determine the optimal
targeting policy. We then evaluate each policy using the test data (we use a 90/10
split for train and test samples), mimicking the step when the firm applies the
chosen policy to a larger population. Because of the relatively low sample size
and high variance in the real-world data, we replicate this procedure 1,000 times.
We report the average and SD of each of the outcomes of the different methods
in Table 2 and additional results in SI Appendix (SI Appendix, Table S4).§§
As can be seen in Table 2, BEAT performs best in removing the imbalance
generated when using the CF-FD; however, it is not statistically different from the
imbalance achieved by just removing protected attributes (CF-NP). Additionally,
unlike the simulated scenarios, the debiased method performs poorly and does
not eliminate the imbalance. This is likely due to the real-world nature of the data,
which have more variance than our simulated settings. In terms of individual
‡‡
Please refer to the “consumer behavior information” section in SI Appendix, section 4 for
details about the collection of the activity-related variables and to the “activity frequency”
section in SI Appendix, Table S2 for the corresponding summary statistics. SI Appendix
includes details about all variables included in the experiment.
§§
To calculate the efficiency and imbalance of each policy, we select the predicted top 50%
of individuals in the test data to target and compute the resulting outcomes, averaging
across the 1,000 draws.
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 Fig. 5. Experiment results: The relationship between protected and unprotected attributes. The figure shows regression coefficients (and 95% CIs) of the
protected attributes on the activity-related variables. We use OLS (ordinary least squares) regression for age and logistic regression for nonmale and non-White.
Blue bars indicate which regression coefficients are significantly different from zero at the 95% CI.

fairness, the debiased method generates especially disparate outcomes with
Δ Policy = 42.3%, while the full causal forest (CF-FD) yields different allocation
for 16.7% of individuals. Unlike our simulated scenarios, the efficiencies of the
personalization methods do not differ from each other in this real-world setting.
[The finding that personalization may yield very little benefit in real settings is
consistent with previous work (27, 31).] That is, in this case, a firm concerned
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highest variable importance when estimating the full causal forest,## and then,
we examine their relative importance when applying each of the other methods
(Fig. 6). (For completeness, we report the top 20 variables identified by each
method in SI Appendix, Fig. S1.)
In the full causal forest, age (a protected attribute) is the most important
variable, with participant’s location, time spent responding to the experiment

about imbalance may be better off by simply using a uniform or random policy survey, and variables related to price sensitivity (e.g., coupon usage, items on
rather than personalizing the offers based on individual’s observable informa- the price sensitivity scale, and spending across different domains) also ranking
tion.¶¶ Therefore, another way BEAT can be used is to help a decision maker among the high-importance variables. The relative importance of these (unpro-
decide whether to use a uniform or a personalized policy. tected) variables remains very similar when removing the protected attributes
Finally, we explore in more depth the attributes that cause the imbalance in (CF-NP)—where age is not used for personalization and therefore, its importance
the most efficient marketing allocation. We identify the 20 variables with the is zero by construction. In contrast, when using the debiased method, where all
the variables aside from age are still used (albeit transformed to be independent
from protected attributes), their importance varies significantly compared with
Table 2. Experiment results: Comparing outcomes the previous two methods. Specifically, location and time spent on the survey
across methods (duration)—variables likely to correlate with age and other protected attributes—
Efficiency Imbalance Δ Policy, % are less important,albeit still relatively important.Finally,results from BEAT reveal
that such variables should not be used when training the model (i.e., splitting the
CF-FD 0.578 0.157 16.7 trees) because doing so would create an imbalance in personalized policies. In
SD (0.050) (0.064) (4.0) other words, consistent with the results presented in Fig. 5, many of the unpro-
CF-NP 0.574 0.057 0
tected variables used by the other methods were deemed to have a relationship
SD (0.050) (0.026) —
with the protected attributes, which then generated unintended imbalance in
Debiased 0.569 0.240 42.3
the other methods. That led BEAT to eliminate these variables as a source of
SD (0.047) (0.088) (3.9)
BEAT (γ = 3) 0.575 0.042 0 heterogeneity for personalization and use other unprotected attributes instead.
SD (0.050) (0.018) —
BEAT (γ = 5) 0.573 0.042 0 Discussion
SD (0.049) (0.018) —
BEAT (γ = 8) 0.562 0.041 0 As personalized targeted policies become more prevalent, the risk
SD (0.049) (0.017) — of algorithmic bias and discrimination of particular groups grows.
The more data used for personalization, the more likely under-
Results comparing CF-FD, CF-NP, debiased, and BEAT are reported. Debiased uses regres-
sion forests to debias the data; BEAT was estimated with moderate and high penalties
lying correlations between protected and unprotected attributes
for imbalance. The table reports the average outcomes (on the test data) of 1,000 runs are to exist, thus generating unintended bias and increasing the
of each method, and the SDs are reported in parentheses. Efficiency is measured as the
proportion of users choosing the discounted product (i.e., market share of the focal brand).
imbalance between targeted and nontargeted groups. As we have
Imbalance calculates the average distance between standardized protected attributes of shown, even existing methods of personalization that are sup-
targeted and nontargeted individuals in the test data. Δ Policy measures the percentage posed to tackle this issue tend to maintain—or even exacerbate—
of individuals for whom the outcome would change if their protected attributes were
different. In particular, we change the age of each customer by ±1 SD. (We chose age imbalance between groups or threaten individual fairness. This
because that was the most meaningful protected attribute as can be seen in Fig. 6.) insight is especially important as firms implement policies that

¶¶
Note that a uniform policy would yield higher costs compared with the policies
presented in the table, which only targeted 50% of individuals.
##
Variable importance indicates the relative importance of each attribute in the forest, and
it is calculated as a simple weighted sum of how many times each feature was split at each
depth when training the forest.

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Downloaded from https://www.pnas.org by 179.251.80.56 on November 28, 2022 from IP address 179.251.80.56.
Fig. 6. Experiment results: Variable importance across methods. The figure plots the variable importance of the top 20 variables for the CF-FD and the
corresponding importance of these variables across the other methods: CF-NP, the debiased method, and BEAT. Details about the experiment and the different
variables appear in SI Appendix (SI Appendix, section 2).
remove protected attributes, presuming that doing so will remove
unintended biases or eliminate the risk of discrimination in tar-
geted policies.
We introduce BEAT, a method to leverage unprotected at-
tributes for personalization while achieving both group and indi-
vidual fairness in protected attributes, thus eliminating bias. This
flexible method can be applied to multidimensional protected
attributes and to both discrete and continuous explanatory and
outcome variables, making it implementable in a wide variety of
empirical contexts. Through a series of simulations and also, using
real data, we show that our method indeed reduces the unintended
bias while allowing for benefits from personalization. We also
demonstrate how our method can be used to evaluate the trade-
off between personalization and imbalance and to decide when a
uniform policy is preferred over a personalized one.
Regarding the applicability of BEAT in our simulations and
experiment, we used examples in which the allocation was based
on the treatment effect. These included an initial phase of random
assignment into treatment, and we utilized BEAT in the second
stage for inference. (Like GRF, BEAT does not require randomized
assignment to be present prior to analyzing the data. It can be used
with observational data as long as there is unconfoundedness.) It is
important to note that BEAT can easily be applied to any type of
allocation decision that is based on prediction algorithms (such as
medical treatments, hiring decisions, lending decisions, recidivism
8 of 9 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115293119
prediction, product recommendations, or dynamic pricing), even
without the random assignment stage. For example, BEAT can
be applied to the case of lending when the decision depends
on the individual’s probability of default. In that case, BEAT is
applied to simple regression forests (instead of causal forest) and
similarly mitigates potential discrimination in the allocation of
loans. We illustrate how BEAT can be applied in prediction tasks
in SI Appendix (SI Appendix, section 3).
A natural extension of this research would be to incorporate
other measures of “fairness.” For example, BEAT uses the dis-
tribution of protected attributes in the sample population and
assigns equal penalty weights to each attribute. A decision maker
might want to apply different weights to different attributes or
might be interested in mimicking the distribution of a different
population. These are straightforward extensions to the proposed
algorithm. Moreover, decision makers may have different fairness
or optimization objectives in mind. As has been documented in
the literature (32, 33), different fairness definitions often yield
different outcomes, and practitioners and researchers should have
a clear objective in mind when designing “fair” policies. We
acknowledge that BEAT, in its current form, ensures equality of
treatment among groups as well as individual parity but might
not be effective for other measures of fairness (e.g., equity, equal
distribution of prediction errors across protected groups). We look
forward to future solutions that allow optimization of multiple
pnas.org
 goals, beyond the ones already incorporated in this research. We
also acknowledge that the goal of BEAT is to leverage personaliza-
tion while balancing the allocation of treatments among individ-
uals with respect to protected attributes. In doing so, it naturally
impacts the efficiency of the outcome of interest as documented in
our simulation results. We hope that future research will develop
methods that improve the efficiency levels while still achieving the
desired goals.
To conclude, BEAT offers a practical solution to an important
problem and allows a decision maker to leverage the value of
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