Abstract
Data-driven decision models based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been widely used in the public and private sectors. These models present challenges and are intended to be fair, effective and transparent in public interest areas. Bias, fairness and government transparency are aspects that significantly impact the functioning of a democratic society. They shape the government’s and its citizens’ relationship, influencing trust, accountability, and the equitable treatment of individuals and groups. Data-driven decision models can be biased at several process stages, contributing to injustices. Our research purpose is to understand fairness in the use of causal discovery for public procurement. By analysing Portuguese public contracts data, we aim i) to predict the place of execution of public contracts using the PC algorithm with sp_mi, smc_?2 and mc_?2 conditional independence tests; ii) to analyse and compare the fairness in those scenarios using Predictive Parity Rate, Proportional Parity, Demographic Parity and Accuracy Parity metrics. By addressing fairness concerns, we pursue to enhance responsible data-driven decision models. We conclude that, in our case, fairness metrics make an assessment more local than global due to causality pathways. We also observe that the Proportional Parity metric is the one with the lowest variance among all metrics and one with the highest precision, and this reinforces the observation that the Agency category is the one that is furthest apart in terms of the proportion of the groups.