The study uses transfer learning to compare surgical outcomes across racial/ethnic subgroups.
problem Difficulty in comparing surgical outcomes due to racial/ethnic and geographic differences.
method Causal inference framework and transfer learning to incorporate data from multiple populations.
result Racial and ethnic differences in surgical outcomes are found, with non-Hispanic Black patients experiencing wide variability.
To answer questions about racial inequality and fairness, we often need a way to infer race and ethnicity from names. One way to infer race and ethnicity from names is by relying on the Census Bureau's list of popular last names. The list, however, suffers from at least three limitations: 1. it only contains last names…
We consider training machine learning models that are fair in the sense that their performance is invariant under certain sensitive perturbations to the inputs. For example, the performance of a resume screening system should be invariant under changes to the gender and/or ethnicity of the applicant. We formalize this …
Improved surname geocoding and name supplements enhance race imputation accuracy.
problem Census data problems affecting race imputation accuracy.
method Fully Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (fBISG) and name supplements.
result Significant improvement in race imputation accuracy across all racial groups.
The Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is the number of infants per 1000 that do not survive until their first birthday. It is an important metric providing information about infant health but it also measures the society's general health status. Despite the high level of prosperity in the U.S.A., the country's IMR is higher …
Study shows how algorithmic prediction affects US housing market, reducing racial wealth disparities.
problem Impact of algorithmic prediction on housing market and racial wealth disparities.
method Natural experiment using digitization of housing records to study entry, allocation, and prices.
result Digitization leads to increased sale prices for minority-owned homes, reducing racial wealth disparities.
Controversies around race and machine learning have sparked debate among computer scientists over how to design machine learning systems that guarantee fairness. These debates rarely engage with how racial identity is embedded in our social experience, making for sociological and psychological complexity. This complexi…
Extends multivariate regression for tensor-variate data, identifying brain regions and facial characteristics.
problem Challenges in fitting regression models with multivariate responses and covariates.
method Low-rank tensor formats on regression coefficients and tensor-variate normal distribution for errors.
result Maximum likelihood estimators for tensor-on-tensor regression via block-relaxation algorithms.
DeepEthnic classifies faces into ethnic groups with high accuracy.
problem Classifying faces into ethnic groups using machine learning.
method Transfer learning from a large-scale data recognition network.
result State-of-the-art success rates for four ethnic groups.
Study decomposes racial healthcare disparities via shifts in mediator distributions.
problem Racial disparities in healthcare expenditures and their underlying drivers.
method Framework decomposing disparities into mediator distribution shifts and residual components, using MEPS data.
result Substantial disparities persist even when mediators are equalized, suggesting unmeasured or structural factors.
Study shows racial bias in health data, which can be reduced with simple techniques.
problem Racial bias in health indicators measured by the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).
method Used publicly available and nationally representative MEPS data to show bias in predictive models for care management.
result Racial bias can be significantly reduced using simple mitigation techniques.
The paper examines how machine learning tools in justice settings can unfairly affect different racial groups.
problem Machine learning tools in justice settings can unfairly affect different racial groups.
method Exploring different ideas of racial equity and their computational trade-offs.
result Computation alone is unlikely to solve the unfairness in machine learning tools for justice settings.
COMPAS recidivism predictions show racial bias against African Americans, study finds.
problem Racial bias in recidivism prediction algorithms.
method Causal analysis using FACT, a fairness measure grounded in causal inference.
result COMPAS shows racial bias against African American defendants, robust to unmeasured confounding.
Paper proposes robust method to detect risk heterogeneity across ethnic groups.
problem Detecting risk heterogeneity across ethnic groups in ICU studies.
method Proposes a robust framework using Neyman orthogonality for inference.
result Demonstrates improved inferential stability and reduced bias compared to standard methods.
A reliable human skin detection method that is adaptable to different human skin colours and illu- mination conditions is essential for better human skin segmentation. Even though different human skin colour detection solutions have been successfully applied, they are prone to false skin detection and are not able to c…
Study finds racial bias in pulse oximeter readings has minimal impact on ICU ventilation rates.
problem Racial disparities in pulse oximeter readings affect clinical decisions in ICU settings.
method Causal inference using path-specific effects and doubly robust estimator.
result Minimal impact of racial discrepancies on invasive ventilation rates, but more pronounced on ventilation duration.
In this work, we investigate the importance of ethnicity in colorectal cancer survivability prediction using machine learning techniques and the SEER cancer incidence database. We compare model performances for 2-year survivability prediction and feature importance rankings between Hispanic, White, and mixed patient po…
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this by utilizing a near-population of ~1.2 million US doctoral recipients from 1977…
Reduces gender classification bias by learning race-invariant face representations.
problem Societal bias in gender recognition systems.
method Adversarially trained autoencoder model to learn race-invariant face representations.
result Achieved a significant drop of over 40% in racial bias surrogate metric with race invariant representations.
This research quantifies cross-sectoral inequalities using latent class analysis.
problem Addressing multiple and intersecting forms of inequality in various sectors.
method Innovative latent class analysis approach to quantify discrepancies.
result Significant discrepancies found among minority ethnic groups and between them and non-minority groups.
Improved image learning using elliptically contoured tensor-variate distributions.
problem Inadequate statistical analysis for tensor-valued data, especially with heavier or lighter tails.
method Developed a family of elliptically contoured tensor-variate distributions and derived their properties and procedures for estimation.
result Tensor-variate classification rules and tensor-on-tensor regression better predict and characterize data than TVN-based methods.
Develops a method to quantify racial bias in law enforcement systems.
problem Quantify racial bias in law enforcement systems considering criminality and multi-stage interactions.
method Multi-stage causal framework incorporating criminality.
result Identifies three canonical scenarios of racial bias in law enforcement.
Recidivism prediction scores are used across the USA to determine sentencing and supervision for hundreds of thousands of inmates. One such generator of recidivism prediction scores is Northpointe's Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) score, used in states like California and F…
Novel approach for robust domain generalization in health studies.
problem Challenges in making statistical inferences about underrepresented minority groups.
method Structured tensor completion for multi-dimensional domain generalization in linear regression models.
result Established rigorous theoretical guarantees and demonstrated minimax optimality.
New dataset for evaluating speech recognition fairness across demographics.
problem Lack of fairness metrics in speech recognition datasets.
method Developed Fair-Speech dataset with diverse demographic information.
result Helps evaluate ASR models for fairness across demographics.
The study examines how social biases are reinforced in machine learning models used for credit scoring.
problem Reinforcement of societal biases in machine learning algorithms for credit scoring.
method Analysis of machine learning models predicting gender or ethnicity based on loan applications data.
result Machine learning models can reflect and reinforce social biases present in the data.
Black women and white men have the highest income disparity in the U.S.
problem Income inequality between black women and white men in the USA
method Dynamic microeconomic model, analyzing black and white population income since 1930
result Black females and white males are poles of overall income inequality
Author name disambiguation in bibliographic databases is the problem of grouping together scientific publications written by the same person, accounting for potential homonyms and/or synonyms. Among solutions to this problem, digital libraries are increasingly offering tools for authors to manually curate their publica…
Predictive modeling is increasingly being employed to assist human decision-makers. One purported advantage of replacing human judgment with computer models in high stakes settings-- such as sentencing, hiring, policing, college admissions, and parole decisions-- is the perceived "neutrality" of computers. It is argued…
Develops causal framework for fair survival analysis in healthcare.
problem Fairness in survival analysis for high-stakes domains like healthcare.
method Causal framework using graphical models, conditional survival function, and Causal Reduction Theorem.
result Decomposes disparities in survival into direct, indirect, and spurious pathways.
Develops tools to audit ML models for bias and unfairness.
problem Auditing ML models for individual bias and unfairness.
method Formalizes the task as an optimization problem and develops inferential tools for the optimal value.
result Demonstrates the utility of tools in revealing biases in COMPAS recidivism prediction instrument.
New deep Cox mixture model improves survival analysis performance.
problem Challenges in survival analysis due to censoring and healthcare applications.
method Learning mixtures of Cox regressions with deep neural networks for hazard ratios and non-parametric baseline hazard.
result Our approach outperforms classical and modern survival analysis methods, especially in minority demographics.
The perennial problem of "how many clusters?" remains an issue of substantial interest in data mining and machine learning communities, and becomes particularly salient in large data sets such as populational genomic data where the number of clusters needs to be relatively large and open-ended. This problem gets furthe…
The study of genetic variants can help find correlating population groups to identify cohorts that are predisposed to common diseases and explain differences in disease susceptibility and how patients react to drugs. Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being applied to identify interacting GVs to understand th…
Method debiases alternative data for fair credit underwriting.
problem Bias in alternative data affecting credit underwriting fairness.
method Causal inference applied to machine learning models.
result Improves model accuracy across racial groups without discrimination.
The study tests and optimizes fairness in credit scoring models.
problem Discrimination in credit scoring models based on protected attributes.
method Formal testing and variable identification to optimize fairness and performance.
result Guidance on monitoring and improving algorithmic fairness in credit scoring.
Two simple methods learn fair metrics from data to improve fairness in ML tasks.
problem Lack of widely accepted fair metrics for many ML tasks hinders individual fairness adoption.
method Presented two simple ways to learn fair metrics from various data types.
result Fair training with learned metrics improves fairness on three ML tasks.
Proposes a fair classification model using robust optimization.
problem Preventing discrimination in classification models.
method Distributionally robust logistic regression with Wasserstein ball and convex unfairness measure.
result Improves fairness with minimal loss in predictive accuracy.
Improved race prediction model outperforms existing methods.
problem Improving race prediction using voter registration data.
method Trained BiLSTM model on voter registration data and created an ensemble.
result Achieved up to 36.8% higher OOS F1 scores than previous models.
New method for analyzing compositional data, addressing biases in summary statistics.
problem Inadequate effect measures for compositional data, especially in high-dimensionality and sparsity.
method Perturbation-based effect measures, average perturbation effects.
result Proposed estimators efficiently estimate average perturbation effects, outperforming existing techniques.
The paper tackles individual fairness in ML models, developing statistical methods to detect bias.
problem Detecting and measuring violations of individual fairness in machine learning models.
method Formalizing the problem as adversarial attack, developing inference tools for the adversarial cost function.
result Statistical methods to assess and test hypotheses of model fairness with non-coverage error rate control.
Linear Mixed Models (LMMs) are important tools in statistical genetics. When used for feature selection, they allow to find a sparse set of genetic traits that best predict a continuous phenotype of interest, while simultaneously correcting for various confounding factors such as age, ethnicity and population structure…
A machine learning model may exhibit discrimination when used to make decisions involving people. One potential cause for such outcomes is that the model uses a statistical proxy for a protected demographic attribute. In this paper we formulate a definition of proxy use for the setting of linear regression and present …
Automatic understanding of human affect using visual signals is a problem that has attracted significant interest over the past 20 years. However, human emotional states are quite complex. To appraise such states displayed in real-world settings, we need expressive emotional descriptors that are capable of capturing an…
TaCo prevents non-linear classifiers from detecting sensitive attributes.
problem Ensuring fairness in NLP models by preventing sensitive attribute detection.
method Targeted Concept Erasure (TaCo) removes sensitive information from final latent representations, even against non-linear classifiers.
result TaCo outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reducing sensitive attribute prediction accuracy while preserving overall task performance.
SLUG method detects bias and out-of-distribution content in generative models.
problem Generative models can underrepresent certain groups and fail on out-of-distribution data.
method SLUG: A new uncertainty quantification method for VAEs combining Laplace approximations and stochastic trace estimators.
result SLUG's UQ score correlates with bias and out-of-distribution content.
Introduces privilege scores to measure and interpret protected attribute-related privilege in machine learning models.
problem Lack of explicit formulation of non-neutrality in fairness-aware machine learning methods.
method Privilege scores (PS) and privilege score contributions (PSCs) to measure and interpret protected attribute-related privilege.
result Demonstrates the broad applicability of PS and PSCs in gender and racial privilege in mortgage and college admissions applications.
Introduces MPR to measure and optimize representation across intersectional groups in retrieval.
problem Harmful stereotypes, cultural erasure, and social disparities in image search and retrieval.
method Develops MPR metric, practical estimation methods, theoretical guarantees, and optimization algorithms.
result Optimizing MPR yields more proportional representation across multiple intersectional groups, often with minimal retrieval accuracy compromise.