{"doi":"10.1145/3580305.3599467","title":"Planning to Fairly Allocate: Probabilistic Fairness in the Restless Bandit Setting","abstract":"Restless and collapsing bandits are often used to model budget-constrained resource allocation in settings where arms have action-dependent transition probabilities, such as the allocation of health interventions among patients. However, SOTA Whittle-index-based approaches to this planning problem either do not consider fairness among arms, or incentivize fairness without guaranteeing it. We thus introduce ProbFair, a probabilistically fair policy that maximizes total expected reward and satisfies the budget constraint while ensuring a strictly positive lower bound on the probability of being pulled at each timestep. We evaluate our algorithm on a real-world application, where interventions support continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy adherence among patients, as well as on a broader class of synthetic transition matrices. We find that ProbFair preserves utility while providing fairness guarantees.","journal":"arXiv (Cornell University)","year":2023,"id":398042,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9467,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1174215,"name":"Aviva Prins","orcid":"0009-0006-4561-0314","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":771618,"name":"Aravind Srinivasan","orcid":"0000-0002-0062-3684","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":573648,"name":"John P. Dickerson","orcid":"0000-0003-2231-680X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1172165,"name":"Christine Herlihy","orcid":"0000-0001-7405-603X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":51,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:19:43.776284Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}