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A data-centric perspective to fair machine learning for healthcare

Machine learning models are increasingly being deployed in real-world clinical settings and have shown promise in patient diagnosis, treatment and outcome tasks. However, such models have also been shown to exhibit biases towards specific demographic groups, leading to inequitable outcomes for under-represented or historically marginalized communities.

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Fig. 1: Common sources of bias in healthcare datasets that are best resolved with a data-centric approach.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation (NSF) 22-586 Faculty Early Career Development Award (no. 2339381), a Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation award and a Google Research Scholar award.

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The authors contributed equally to all aspects of the article.

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Correspondence to Marzyeh Ghassemi.

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Zhang, H., Gerych, W. & Ghassemi, M. A data-centric perspective to fair machine learning for healthcare. Nat Rev Methods Primers 4, 86 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-024-00371-x

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