A biased medical algorithm favored white people for health-care programs

A study has highlighted the risks inherent in using historical data to train machine-learning algorithms to make predictions. The news: An algorithm that many US health providers use to predict which patients will most need extra medical care privileged white patients over black patients, according to researchers at UC Berkeley, whose study was published in Science. Effectively, it bumped whites up the queue for special treatments for complex conditions like kidney problems or diabetes. The study: The researchers dug through almost 50,000 records from a large, undisclosed academic hospital. They found that white patients were given higher risk scores, and were therefore more likely to be selected for extra care (like more nursing or dedicated appointments), than black patients who were in fact equally sick.