Related papers: A calibrated BISG for inferring race from surname …
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…
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),…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Twitter is often used in quantitative studies that identify geographically-preferred topics, writing styles, and entities. These studies rely on either GPS coordinates attached to individual messages, or on the user-supplied location field…
We demonstrate how language can improve geolocation: the task of predicting the location where an image was taken. Here we study explicit knowledge from human-written guidebooks that describe the salient and class-discriminative visual…
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…
Biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of biological organisms. The mindset of the engineer is that we can learn from nature. Biogeography Based Optimization is a burgeoning nature inspired technique to find the optimal…
In this paper, we consider the problem of predicting demographics of geographic units given geotagged Tweets that are composed within these units. Traditional survey methods that offer demographics estimates are usually limited in terms of…
Racialized economic segregation, a key metric that simultaneously accounts for spatial, social and income polarization, has been linked to adverse health outcomes, including morbidity and mortality; however, statistical methods for…
To answer questions about racial inequality and fairness, we often need a way to infer race and ethnicity from names. One way to infer race and ethnicity from names is by relying on the Census Bureau's list of popular last names. The list,…