arXiv Machine Learning

FRAME: separating sampling variation from representational cause in medical imaging fairness

The paper introduces FRAME, a two‑step framework for auditing fairness claims in medical imaging. First, it derives a fair‑model reference distribution that captures the portion of subgroup performance differences attributable to sampling variation. Second, it tests the remaining difference using operators in representation space to assess whether demographic information or disease entanglement drives the bias. Across a large dataset of 702,206 images and 36 encoders, the reference explains a substantial median share of race and age differences, while interventions such as injecting demographic decodability or entangling disease direction have limited impact on the residual bias.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Demographically-Conditioned Synthetic Medical Images for Bias Mitigation and Bias Detection in Disease Classifiers

arXiv:2607. 14984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-subgroup fairness audits of medical image classifiers face a sample-size problem: minority subgroups in held-out test sets have so few samples that the resulting confidence intervals on per-subgroup performance are wider than the bias the audit is meant to detect.

By Mahmoud Ibrahim, Bart Elen, Chang Sun, Gokhan Ertaylan, Michel Dumontier
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Beyond Predictive Fairness: Quantifying Attribution Consistency Across Demographic Groups in Diabetic Retinopathy Screening

The paper introduces the Explanation Consistency Score (ECS), a fairness‑aware metric that uses Jensen‑Shannon divergence to measure how similar attribution maps are across demographic subgroups. Applied to diabetic retinopathy screening, ECS is evaluated both overall and within disease severity levels. Results show that although predictive performance varies among ethnic groups, explanation consistency remains high and is not significantly linked to performance disparities, indicating that predictive fairness and explanation consistency assess different aspects of model behavior.

By Kerol Djoumessi, Philipp Berens
arXiv AI
Aug 20

FairGlucose: A CGM Fairness Benchmark Reveals Subgroup Disparities Hidden in Population-Level Validation

FairGlucose is a 300‑patient CGM cohort balanced across 12 demographic strata, providing 132,480 forecasting samples and 3,945 behavioral events. Benchmarking 33 models on 2‑hour glucose forecasting revealed that population‑level validation masks significant subgroup disparities, with error ratios ranging from 0.8 to 1.4 and T1D patients experiencing 6 mg/dL higher error than T2D. The study shows that these gaps persist across all models, align with clinically hard cases, and vary with input‑length sensitivity, underscoring the need for subgroup‑disaggregated reporting in digital health AI.

By Junjie Luo, Xuzhe Zhi, Rui Han, Abhimanyu Kumbara, Anand K. Iyer, Mansur E. Shomali, Ritu Agarwal, Guodong Gordon Gao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 9

FairSelect: A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Level and Intersectional Algorithmic Fairness

Algorithmic fairness methods are increasingly used to identify and mitigate bias in machine learning models, yet most approaches are evaluated in isolation and along single demographic axes. This limits practical guidance for selecting fairness strategies, where disparities may arise across intersectional subgroups and across multiple stages of the modeling lifecycle.