Investigating Presence of Ethnoracial Bias in Clinical Data using Machine Learning

An important target for machine learning research is obtaining unbiased results, which require addressing bias that might be present in the data as well as the methodology. This is of utmost importance in medical applications of machine learning, where trained models should be unbiased so as to result in systems that are widely applicable, reliable and fair. Since bias can sometimes be introduced through the data itself, in this paper we investigate the presence of ethnoracial bias in patients’ clinical data. We focus primarily on vital signs and demographic information and classify patient ethnoraces in subsets of two from the three ethnoracial groups (African Americans, Caucasians, and Hispanics). Our results show that ethnorace can be identified in two out of three patients, setting the initial base for further investigation of the complex issue of ehtnoracial bias.