Related papers: Addressing Census data problems in race imputation…
Estimating racial disparity requires individual-level race data, which are often unavailable due to the sensitivity of collecting such information. To address this problem, many researchers utilize Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding…
Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is a ubiquitous tool for predicting race and ethnicity using an individual's geolocation and surname. Here we demonstrate that statistical dependence of surname and geolocation within racial/ethnic…
The estimation of racial disparities in various fields is often hampered by the lack of individual-level racial information. In many cases, the law prohibits the collection of such information to prevent direct racial discrimination. As a…
Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is the most popular method for proxying race/ethnicity in voter registration files that do not contain it. This paper benchmarks BISG against a range of previously untested machine learning…
We provide the largest compiled publicly available dictionaries of first, middle, and last names for the purpose of imputing race and ethnicity using, for example, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG). The dictionaries are based on…
Sampling geographically dispersed minority populations poses substantial challenges when individual group membership cannot be directly observed. Although stratified sampling can offer efficiency gains, these gains are typically modest…
Accurate imputation of race and ethnicity (R&E) is crucial for analyzing disparities and informing policy. Methods like Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) are widely used but exhibit limitations, including systematic…
Health care decisions are increasingly informed by clinical decision support algorithms, but these algorithms may perpetuate or increase racial and ethnic disparities in access to and quality of health care. Further complicating the…
Measuring average differences in an outcome across racial or ethnic groups is a crucial first step for equity assessments, but researchers often lack access to data on individuals' races and ethnicities to calculate them. A common solution…
Estimating racial disparities in loan-approval probabilities when race is unobserved is routinely required for fair lending compliance. In such cases, race probabilities-typically from Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG)-stand in for…
I demonstrate that large language models can infer ethnicity from names with accuracy exceeding that of Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) without additional training data, enabling inference outside the United States and to…
In the absence of sensitive race and ethnicity data, researchers, regulators, and firms alike turn to proxies. In this paper, I train a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model on a novel dataset of voter registration data from…
Researchers are often interested in linking individuals between two datasets that lack a common unique identifier. Matching procedures often struggle to match records with common names, birthplaces or other field values. Computational…
Genetic risk prediction is an important component of individualized medicine, but prediction accuracies remain low for many complex diseases. A fundamental limitation is the sample sizes of the studies on which the prediction algorithms are…
Racial disparity in academia is a widely acknowledged problem. The quantitative understanding of racial based systemic inequalities is an important step towards a more equitable research system. However, because of the lack of robust…
Gender classification algorithms have important applications in many domains today such as demographic research, law enforcement, as well as human-computer interaction. Recent research showed that algorithms trained on biased benchmark…
The identification of genetic signal regions in the human genome is critical for understanding the genetic architecture of complex traits and diseases. Numerous methods based on scan algorithms (i.e. QSCAN, SCANG, SCANG-STARR) have been…
The demographic disparity of biometric systems has led to serious concerns regarding their societal impact as well as applicability of such systems in private and public domains. A quantitative evaluation of demographic fairness is an…
Fine resolution estimates of demographic and socioeconomic attributes are crucial for planning and policy development. While several efforts have been made to produce fine-scale gridded population estimates, socioeconomic features are…
In this paper, we study the accuracy of values aggregated over classes predicted by a classification algorithm. The problem is that the resulting aggregates (e.g., sums of a variable) are known to be biased. The bias can be large even for…