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.
By Mahshad Lotfinia, Daniel Truhn, Andreas Maier, Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh
Subgroup performance differences are the standard evidence for fairness bias in medical imaging, and the usual response removes the demographic information that a model encodes. Here we introduce Fair...
arXiv:2604. 16450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Intersectional biases in healthcare data can produce compound disparities in clinical machine learning models, yet most fairness evaluations assess demographic attributes independently.
By Nick Souligne, Vignesh Subbian
arXiv:2607. 08953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
By Nick Souligne, Isabella Mixton-Garcia, Vignesh Subbian
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.
The paper examines how fairness conclusions in ICU mortality prediction using MIMIC-IV depend on the choice of metrics and the granularity of demographic analysis. It compares predictive-utility and subgroup-error metrics across various fairness interventions and introduces a lightweight adaptation strategy that balances ethnicity, gender, and insurance representation without conditioning on mortality outcomes. The study finds that different interventions can be evaluated differently across accuracy, sensitivity, and false-positive rate, and that marginal demographic summaries may hide heterogeneous error patterns within intersectional subgroups.
By Abdullah Al Noman, Fahmid Al Rifat, Tahrima Hashem, Syed Muhammad Ibne Zulfiker, Rishov Paul, Tanzima HAshem