Hammaad Adam

Hammaad Adam, Ming Ying Yang, Kenrick Cato et al.

Clinical notes are becoming an increasingly important data source for machine learning (ML) applications in healthcare. Prior research has shown that deploying ML models can perpetuate existing biases against racial minorities, as bias can be implicitly embedded in data. In this study, we investigate the level of implicit race information available to ML models and human experts and the implications of model-detectable differences in clinical notes. Our work makes three key contributions. First, we find that models can identify patient self-reported race from clinical notes even when the notes are stripped of explicit indicators of race. Second, we determine that human experts are not able to accurately predict patient race from the same redacted clinical notes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential harm of this implicit information in a simulation study, and show that models trained on these race-redacted clinical notes can still perpetuate existing biases in clinical treatment decisions.

Hammaad Adam, Fan Yin, Huibin et al.

Randomized experiments often need to be stopped prematurely due to the treatment having an unintended harmful effect. Existing methods that determine when to stop an experiment early are typically applied to the data in aggregate and do not account for treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we study the early stopping of experiments for harm on heterogeneous populations. We first establish that current methods often fail to stop experiments when the treatment harms a minority group of participants. We then use causal machine learning to develop CLASH, the first broadly-applicable method for heterogeneous early stopping. We demonstrate CLASH's performance on simulated and real data and show that it yields effective early stopping for both clinical trials and A/B tests.

Hyewon Jeong, Suyeol Yun, Hammaad Adam

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are an established technique to screen for abnormal cardiac signals. Recent work has established that it is possible to detect arrhythmia directly from the ECG signal using deep learning algorithms. While a few prior approaches with contrastive learning have been successful, the best way to define a positive sample remains an open question. In this project, we investigate several ways to define positive samples, and assess which approach yields the best performance in a downstream task of classifying arrhythmia. We explore spatiotemporal invariances, generic augmentations, demographic similarities, cardiac rhythms, and wave attributes of ECG as potential ways to match positive samples. We then evaluate each strategy with downstream task performance, and find that learned representations invariant to patient identity are powerful in arrhythmia detection. We made our code available in: https://github.com/mandiehyewon/goodviews_ecg.git

Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Lydia T. Liu, Angela Zhou et al.

Automated decision systems (ADS) leverage predictions about individual future outcomes to inform consequential decision-making in organizational settings. Across various settings - including criminal pretrial release, clinical triage, student support, and more - it is often assumed that improved predictive accuracy is the priority consideration in determining better downstream outcomes upon the deployment of ADS. In practice, real-world case studies reveal that this is far from the case: introducing individual predictions into decision-making modifies organizational workflows, assessment, and decision-making processes in ways that require a complete re-consideration of our approach to the design, evaluation, and deployment of ADS. As a result, this Perspective develops an integrated framework for studying ADS in social systems, shifting current priorities from a purely prediction-based paradigm towards an intervention-oriented view that accounts for real-world conditions. Our aim is to improve our understanding of ADS and more meaningfully anticipate its downstream societal and organizational consequences.

Lydia T. Liu, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Angela Zhou et al.

Many automated decision systems (ADS) are designed to solve prediction problems -- where the goal is to learn patterns from a sample of the population and apply them to individuals from the same population. In reality, these prediction systems operationalize holistic policy interventions in deployment. Once deployed, ADS can shape impacted population outcomes through an effective policy change in how decision-makers operate, while also being defined by past and present interactions between stakeholders and the limitations of existing organizational, as well as societal, infrastructure and context. In this work, we consider the ways in which we must shift from a prediction-focused paradigm to an interventionist paradigm when considering the impact of ADS within social systems. We argue this requires a new default problem setup for ADS beyond prediction, to instead consider predictions as decision support, final decisions, and outcomes. We highlight how this perspective unifies modern statistical frameworks and other tools to study the design, implementation, and evaluation of ADS systems, and point to the research directions necessary to operationalize this paradigm shift. Using these tools, we characterize the limitations of focusing on isolated prediction tasks, and lay the foundation for a more intervention-oriented approach to developing and deploying ADS.