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Minutes of Meeting – Differential Fairness Toolkit Project

Date: Friday 28th November Time: 4:00 PM Location: Online Present: All four group members (Nick, Kayla, Becky, Raiet)

1. Purpose of the Meeting

To discuss early ideas and research for implementing a differential fairness toolkit for the HPDM139 group project.

2. Discussion Summary

2.1 Differential Fairness – Approach

  • The group explored how differential fairness can be implemented in a simple, reusable Python package suitable for health data science workflows.

  • Key considerations included:

  • How to design functions that compute differential fairness metrics.

  • How to apply fairness evaluation to typical health datasets (e.g., structured tabular data).
  • Making the package easy for other students/health data scientists to import and use.

2.2 Review of Intersectional Fairness Literature

  • Kayla shared a key research paper on intersectional fairness, explaining the concept of protecting multiple marginalised groups defined by combinations of attributes (e.g., age × sex × ethnicity).

  • The group agreed that intersectional approaches should be included in the toolkit:

  • Handling intersectional subgroups efficiently

  • Avoiding small-group instability
  • Considering privacy-preserving or smoothed estimators

2.3 Exploration of Reference GitHub Repo

  • The group examined an existing GitHub repository implementing differential fairness.

  • Noted as a useful reference for:

  • Code structure

  • Metric definitions
  • Potential API patterns
  • Agreed not to copy directly, but to take inspiration for organising our own package.

3. Actions Agreed

  • All members to read and (try!) to understand the shared intersectional fairness paper in detail.

  • Each member to come back next week with:

  • Ideas on how we might structure our package (modules, functions, workflow).

  • Thoughts on which metrics and visualisations to prioritise.
  • A firm plan for how we will divide work and deliver the package by the 9th January project deadline.

4. Date of Next Meeting

4th December 2025, 10.30am, online.