This paper introduces a novel kernel-based formulation of the Equalized Odds (EO) criterion, denoted as $\operatorname{EO}_k$, for fair representation learning (FRL) in supervised settings. The central goal of FRL is to mitigate discrimination regarding a sensitive attribute $S$ while preserving prediction accuracy for the target variable $Y$. Our proposed criterion enables a rigorous and interpretable quantification of three core fairness objectives: independence ($\widehat{Y} \perp S$), separation—also known as equalized odds ($\widehat{Y} \perp S \mid Y$), and calibration ($Y \perp S \mid \widehat{Y}$). Under both unbiased ($Y \perp S$) and biased ($Y \not \perp S$) conditions, we show that $\operatorname{EO}_k$ satisfies both independence and separation in the former, and uniquely preserves predictive accuracy while lower bounding independence and calibration in the latter, thereby offering a unified analytical characterization of the tradeoffs among these fairness criteria. We further define the empirical counterpart, $\widehat{\operatorname{EO}}_k$, a kernel-based statistic that can be computed in quadratic time, with linear-time approximations also available. A concentration inequality for $\widehat{\operatorname{EO}}_k$ is derived, providing performance guarantees and error bounds, which serve as practical certificates of fairness compliance. While our focus is on theoretical development, the results lay essential groundwork for principled and provably fair algorithmic design in future empirical studies.

Multinomial logistic regression is a useful model for predicting the probabilities of multiclass outcomes. Because of the complexity and high dimensionality of some data, it is challenging to fit a valid model with high accuracy and interpretability. We propose a novel sparse reduced-rank multinomial logistic regression model to jointly select variables and reduce the dimension via a nonconvex row constraint. We develop a block-wise iterative algorithm with a majorizing surrogate function to efficiently solve the optimization problem. From an algorithmic aspect, we show that the output estimator enjoys consistency in estimation and sparsity recovery even in a high-dimensional setting. The finite sample performance of the proposed method is investigated via simulation studies and two real image data sets. The results show that our proposal has competitive performance in both estimation accuracy and computation time. History: Accepted by Andrea Lodi, Area Editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms–Discrete. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71991474, 12171449, 11801540, and 12071494] and the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province [Grant BJ2040170017]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0132 .