Bias & Fairness Controls
Measuring disparate outcomes, choosing a fairness definition, and living with the trade-off.
6 to work through
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beginner Multiple choice
A team removes the ethnicity field from a credit model's training data and tells the risk committee the model can no longer discriminate. What is the most accurate response?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A lending team's fairness dashboard shows approval-rate parity across protected groups, refreshed monthly, green for six months. Review it. What would you remove, what would you change, and what would you leave alone?
3 min answer -
advanced
A lending model shows different approval rates across demographic groups. The business asks you to "make it fair". What do you do?
2 min answer -
advanced
A model used in underwriting must be demonstrably fair. What controls are architectural, and what is the hard part?
2 min answer -
advanced
A model's outcomes differ across demographic groups. What can architecture actually do about it?
2 min answer -
advanced
An interviewer says — you run architecture for a consumer lending platform. The regulator expects evidence that your model is not producing disparate outcomes across ethnic groups. Legal tells you that you may not collect applicants' ethnicity. Where do you take this?
3 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Bias and Fairness Control
Measuring and constraining disparate outcomes across groups, where the definition of fairness must be chosen deliberately because the definitions are…
conceptFairness Definition Choice
The unavoidable selection between mathematically incompatible fairness definitions - a legal and business determination that a team makes implicitly …
conceptFairness Through Unawareness
The mistaken belief that removing a protected attribute from a model's inputs prevents disparate outcomes, when correlated features still carry the a…
Neighbouring topics
Assurance, Audit & Model Risk
General material on assurance, architectural governance and risk oversight.
Control Design vs Operation
A control that is well designed and never runs fails exactly like one that is absent.
Audit Evidence
Producing durable, tamper-evident proof as a by-product rather than as a project.
Certification Impact on Architecture
What SOC 2 and ISO 27001 actually require of a design, and what they do not.
Continuous Controls Monitoring
Testing controls continuously instead of sampling them once a year.
Segregation of Duties
Splitting authority so no single actor can both make and approve a change.
Change Advisory vs Automated Gates
Replacing a weekly board with evidence a machine produces on every change.
Risk Appetite
The stated tolerance that tells you which risks you are allowed to accept.
Risk Assessment Methods
Qualitative matrices, FAIR and scenario analysis, and the illusion of a precise score.
Security Design Review
Reviewing an architecture for security while changing it is still cheap.
Architecture Compliance Checks
Automating conformance to standards so review effort goes to the genuinely novel.
Exception & Waiver Management
Time-boxed, owned deviations with a remediation date, rather than permanent silence.
Design Authority
How an ARB should decide, what it should not review, and how it avoids becoming a queue.
Three Lines Model
Ownership, oversight and independent assurance, and where architecture sits in it.
Model Risk Management
Inventory, validation, monitoring and challenge for models that make consequential decisions.
AI Risk Tiering
Classifying a use case by potential harm, and the obligations each tier triggers.
Model Documentation
Model cards, intended use, limitations, and the record a regulator will ask for.
Model Evaluation & Red-Teaming
Adversarial testing of a probabilistic system with no fixed expected output.
Human-in-the-Loop Design
Meaningful review rather than a rubber stamp, and designing against automation bias.