Related papers: Beyond Predictive Algorithms in Child Welfare
Child welfare (CW) agencies use risk assessment tools as a means to achieve evidence-based, consistent, and unbiased decision-making. These risk assessments act as data collection mechanisms and have further evolved into algorithmic systems…
Risk assessment algorithms are being adopted by public sector agencies to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. Algorithms model "risk" based on individual client characteristics to identify clients most in need. However, this…
Caseworkers are trained to write detailed narratives about families in Child-Welfare (CW) which informs collaborative high-stakes decision-making. Unlike other administrative data, these narratives offer a more credible source of…
The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is increasingly seeking to emulate business models of the private sector centered in efficiency, cost reduction, and innovation through the adoption of algorithms. These data-driven systems purportedly…
Child welfare agencies across the United States are turning to data-driven predictive technologies (commonly called predictive analytics) which use government administrative data to assist workers' decision-making. While some prior work has…
The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is charged with improving outcomes for foster youth; yet, they are overburdened and underfunded. To overcome this limitation, several states have turned towards algorithmic decision-making systems to…
Algorithms in public services such as child welfare, criminal justice, and education are increasingly being used to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. Drawing upon findings from a two-year ethnography conducted at a child welfare…
Although much literature has established the presence of demographic bias in natural language processing (NLP) models, most work relies on curated bias metrics that may not be reflective of real-world applications. At the same time,…
Increasingly, the combination of clinical judgment and predictive risk modelling have been assisting social workers to segregate children at risk of maltreatment and recommend potential interventions of authorities. A critical concern among…
The combination of clinical judgement and predictive risk models crucially assist social workers to segregate children at risk of maltreatment and decide when authorities should intervene. Predictive risk modelling to address this matter…
Governments are the primary providers of essential public services and are responsible for delivering them effectively. In high-stakes decision-making domains such as child welfare (CW), agencies must protect children without unnecessarily…
Purpose: Reasoning language models (RLMs) have demonstrated significant advances in solving complex reasoning tasks. We examined their potential to assess parental cooperation during CPS interventions using case reports, a case factor…
Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to help humans make decisions in high-stakes settings, such as medicine, criminal justice and education. In each of these cases, the purpose of the risk assessment tool is to inform…
In this work, we study how the relevance/quality and quantity of past data influence performance by analyzing a contextual Newsvendor problem, in which a decision-maker trades off between underage and overage costs under uncertain demand.…
In domains such as criminal justice, medicine, and social welfare, decision makers increasingly have access to algorithmic Risk Assessment Instruments (RAIs). RAIs estimate the risk of an adverse outcome such as recidivism or child neglect,…
The algorithmic fairness of predictive analytic tools in the public sector has increasingly become a topic of rigorous exploration. While instruments pertaining to criminal recidivism and academic admissions, for example, have garnered much…
Objective: This study develops a systematic benchmarking framework for testing whether language models can accurately identify constructs of interest in child welfare records. The objective is to assess how different model sizes and…
Algorithmic risk assessment tools are now commonplace in public sector domains such as criminal justice and human services. These tools are intended to aid decision makers in systematically using rich and complex data captured in…
Big data and algorithmic risk prediction tools promise to improve criminal justice systems by reducing human biases and inconsistencies in decision making. Yet different, equally-justifiable choices when developing, testing, and deploying…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are often designed specifically for a particular problem and they generally have uninterpretable working processes. Statistical methods-based agent algorithms can be improved in terms of generalizability…