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Main Authors: Jones, Charles, Glocker, Ben
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04295
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author Jones, Charles
Glocker, Ben
author_facet Jones, Charles
Glocker, Ben
contents Machine learning methods often fail when deployed in the real world. Worse still, they fail in high-stakes situations and across socially sensitive lines. These issues have a chilling effect on the adoption of machine learning methods in settings such as medical diagnosis, where they are arguably best-placed to provide benefits if safely deployed. In this primer, we introduce the causal and statistical structures which induce failure in machine learning methods for image analysis. We highlight two previously overlooked problems, which we call the \textit{no fair lunch} problem and the \textit{subgroup separability} problem. We elucidate why today's fair representation learning methods fail to adequately solve them and propose potential paths forward for the field.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04295
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Primer on Causal and Statistical Dataset Biases for Fair and Robust Image Analysis
Jones, Charles
Glocker, Ben
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Machine learning methods often fail when deployed in the real world. Worse still, they fail in high-stakes situations and across socially sensitive lines. These issues have a chilling effect on the adoption of machine learning methods in settings such as medical diagnosis, where they are arguably best-placed to provide benefits if safely deployed. In this primer, we introduce the causal and statistical structures which induce failure in machine learning methods for image analysis. We highlight two previously overlooked problems, which we call the \textit{no fair lunch} problem and the \textit{subgroup separability} problem. We elucidate why today's fair representation learning methods fail to adequately solve them and propose potential paths forward for the field.
title A Primer on Causal and Statistical Dataset Biases for Fair and Robust Image Analysis
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04295