AI Governance Engineer
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Counterfactual fairness

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The requirement that a decision about an individual be the same in a counterfactual world where the individual belonged to a different group, defined through a causal model 1; approximated in practice by counterfactual flip tests.

Developed in
ch. 16, Individual and counterfactual fairness
Chapters
ch. 16, Fairness & XAI
Contrast with
Counterfactual explanation · Counterfactual flip test
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Sources

  1. [1] "Counterfactual Fairness" (Kusner, Loftus, Russell and Silva; arXiv 1703.06856). arXiv. 2017-03-20. https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06856 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Counterfactual fairness. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/counterfactual-fairness. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026counterfactualfairness,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Counterfactual fairness}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/counterfactual-fairness}
}