For business, algorithmic bias has become a big issue. Many companies, and the software vendors selling them A.I., worry that their automated systems unfairly discriminate against protected classes of individuals, risking legal, regulatory, and reputational trouble. Fear of algorithmic bias has slowed deployment of A.I. in many sectors. It has also opened up a whole sub-industry of consultants and software vendors that sell tools to detect algorithmic bias and try to mitigate it. Much of the focus has been on how to fix biased data. Minority groups are underrepresented in most datasets—in fact, due to overt and implicit discrimination and human bias, they are often far less represented in the data than they are even in a given population. This mean A.I. systems trained on this data won’t perform as well for minority groups. One solution has been to try to curate better datasets, with better minority representation. Another has been to test rigorously to make sure that historical biases, such as unfair lending practices, are not replicated by A.I. But it turns out that mitigating bias is far harder than even many experts assume, as a story last week in the tech publication The Register pointed out. The story cited a research paper published in the science journal Science Advances that looked at racial bias in an A.I. system designed to classify brain activity from functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) scans. It turns out that the datasets of fMRI data used to train these kind of A.I. systems don't have much data from Black Americans. So it’s not surprisingly that the algorithms performed poorly on scans of Black patients. But what is surprising is that even when the researchers curated a training dataset consisting only of data from Black Americans, the resulting system still performed worse on Black patients than the standard system performed on white patients.
Continue reading: https://fortune.com/2022/05/03/eliminating-ai-bias-algorithms-difficult/
Continue reading: https://fortune.com/2022/05/03/eliminating-ai-bias-algorithms-difficult/
