MIT Researcher Explores The Downside Of Machine Learning In Healthcare - Liwaiwai

While working toward her dissertation in Computer Science, Marzyeh Ghassemi PhD '17 wrote some papers on how machine learning techniques from AI could be applied to clinical data in order to predict patient outcomes. "It wasn't until the end of my PhD work that one of my committee members asked: 'Did you ever check to see how well your model worked across different groups of people?'" That question was eye-opening for Ghassemi, who had previously assessed the performance of models in aggregate, across all patients. Upon a closer look, she saw that models often worked differently, specifically worse, for minorities like black women--a revelation that took her by surprise. "I hadn't made the connection beforehand that health disparities would translate directly to model disparities," she says. "And given that I am a visible minority woman-identifying computer scientist at MIT, I am reasonably certain that many others weren't aware of this either."