Related papers: How should we proxy for race/ethnicity? Comparing …
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…
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…
Prediction of individual's race and ethnicity plays an important role in social science and public health research. Examples include studies of racial disparity in health and voting. Recently, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG),…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Proxy-based race inference is increasingly used to conduct fairness assessments when protected-class data are unavailable or legally restricted -- most prominently in U.S. fair-lending enforcement, and now explicitly contemplated in…
AI fairness measurements, including tests for equal treatment, often take the form of disaggregated evaluations of AI systems. Such measurements are an important part of Responsible AI operations. These measurements compare system…
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…
Prediction models can improve efficiency by automating decisions such as the approval of loan applications. However, they may inherit bias against protected groups from the data they are trained on. This paper adds counterfactual…
Systems incorporating biometric technologies have become ubiquitous in personal, commercial, and governmental identity management applications. Both cooperative (e.g. access control) and non-cooperative (e.g. surveillance and forensics)…
In this paper we explore the possibility of using bibliographic databases for tracking the geographic origin of surnames. Surnames are used as a proxy to determine the ethnic, genetic or geographic origin of individuals in many fields such…
Recently, concerns regarding potential biases in the underlying algorithms of many automated systems (including biometrics) have been raised. In this context, a biased algorithm produces statistically different outcomes for different groups…
Biometrics systems have significantly improved person identification and authentication, playing an important role in personal, national, and global security. However, these systems might be deceived (or "spoofed") and, despite the recent…
Many datasets contain personally identifiable information, or PII, which poses privacy risks to individuals. PII masking is commonly used to redact personal information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers from text data. Most modern…