{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,4]],"date-time":"2026-02-04T17:35:02Z","timestamp":1770226502745,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":45,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,4]],"date-time":"2026-02-04T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1770163200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Big Data"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Long-term fairness in sequential decision-making is critical yet challenging, as decisions at each time step influence future opportunities and outcomes, potentially exacerbating existing disparities over time. While existing methods primarily achieve fairness by directly adjusting decision models, in this work, we study a complementary perspective based on sequential algorithmic recourse, in which fairness is pursued through actionable interventions for individuals. We introduce Sequential Causal Algorithmic Recourse for Fairness (SCARF), a causally grounded framework that generates temporally coherent recourse trajectories by integrating structural causal modeling with sequential generative modeling. By explicitly incorporating both short-term and long-term fairness constraints, as well as practical budget limitations, SCARF generates personalized recourse plans that effectively mitigate disparities over multiple decision cycles. Through experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets, we empirically examine how different recourse strategies influence fairness dynamics over time, illustrating the trade-offs between short-term and long-term fairness under sequential interventions. The results demonstrate that SCARF provides a practical and informative framework for analyzing long-term fairness in dynamic decision-making settings.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3389\/fdata.2026.1750906","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,4]],"date-time":"2026-02-04T05:34:04Z","timestamp":1770183244000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Algorithmic recourse in sequential decision-making for long-term fairness"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"9","author":[{"given":"Francisco","family":"Gumucio","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Arkansas","place":["Fayetteville, AR, United States"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Lu","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Arkansas","place":["Fayetteville, AR, United States"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,4]]},"reference":[{"key":"B1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"981","DOI":"10.1145\/3468264.3468536","article-title":"\u201cFair preprocessing: towards understanding compositional fairness of data transformers in machine learning pipeline,\u201d","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering","author":"Biswas","year":"2021"},{"key":"B2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.48550\/arXiv.1409.1259","article-title":"On the properties of neural machine translation: encoder-decoder approaches","author":"Cho","year":"2014","journal-title":"arXiv"},{"key":"B3","first-page":"3741","article-title":"Order-independent constraint-based causal structure learning","volume":"15","author":"Colombo","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. 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