Auditing the Fairness of the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub's Case Prediction Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Abrar, Saad Mohammad, Awasthi, Naman, Smolyak, Daniel, Frias-Martinez, Vanessa
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Abrar, Saad Mohammad
Awasthi, Naman
Smolyak, Daniel
Frias-Martinez, Vanessa
author_facet Abrar, Saad Mohammad
Awasthi, Naman
Smolyak, Daniel
Frias-Martinez, Vanessa
contents The US COVID-19 Forecast Hub, a repository of COVID-19 forecasts from over 50 independent research groups, is used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for their official COVID-19 communications. As such, the Forecast Hub is a critical centralized resource to promote transparent decision making. While the Forecast Hub has provided valuable predictions focused on accuracy, there is an opportunity to evaluate model performance across social determinants such as race and urbanization level that have been known to play a role in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive fairness analysis of the Forecast Hub model predictions and we show statistically significant diverse predictive performance across social determinants, with minority racial and ethnic groups as well as less urbanized areas often associated with higher prediction errors. We hope this work will encourage COVID-19 modelers and the CDC to report fairness metrics together with accuracy, and to reflect on the potential harms of the models on specific social groups and contexts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_14891
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Auditing the Fairness of the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub's Case Prediction Models
Abrar, Saad Mohammad
Awasthi, Naman
Smolyak, Daniel
Frias-Martinez, Vanessa
Applications
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
The US COVID-19 Forecast Hub, a repository of COVID-19 forecasts from over 50 independent research groups, is used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for their official COVID-19 communications. As such, the Forecast Hub is a critical centralized resource to promote transparent decision making. While the Forecast Hub has provided valuable predictions focused on accuracy, there is an opportunity to evaluate model performance across social determinants such as race and urbanization level that have been known to play a role in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive fairness analysis of the Forecast Hub model predictions and we show statistically significant diverse predictive performance across social determinants, with minority racial and ethnic groups as well as less urbanized areas often associated with higher prediction errors. We hope this work will encourage COVID-19 modelers and the CDC to report fairness metrics together with accuracy, and to reflect on the potential harms of the models on specific social groups and contexts.
title Auditing the Fairness of the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub's Case Prediction Models
topic Applications
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14891