An ExplainableFair Framework for Prediction of Substance Use Disorder Treatment Completion
This addresses fairness and interpretability issues in healthcare AI for clinicians and researchers, but it is incremental as it combines existing approaches.
The study tackled the problem of ensuring fairness and explainability in machine learning models for predicting substance use disorder treatment completion, resulting in fairness-enhanced models that retained high sensitivity and provided explanations for fairness improvements.
Fairness of machine learning models in healthcare has drawn increasing attention from clinicians, researchers, and even at the highest level of government. On the other hand, the importance of developing and deploying interpretable or explainable models has been demonstrated, and is essential to increasing the trustworthiness and likelihood of adoption of these models. The objective of this study was to develop and implement a framework for addressing both these issues - fairness and explainability. We propose an explainable fairness framework, first developing a model with optimized performance, and then using an in-processing approach to mitigate model biases relative to the sensitive attributes of race and sex. We then explore and visualize explanations of the model changes that lead to the fairness enhancement process through exploring the changes in importance of features. Our resulting-fairness enhanced models retain high sensitivity with improved fairness and explanations of the fairness-enhancement that may provide helpful insights for healthcare providers to guide clinical decision-making and resource allocation.