Fairness in Healthcare: Assessing Data Bias and Algorithmic Fairness

With the wide employment of Artificial Intelligence-based systems in healthcare, there is an increasing need to further quantify and analyze potential biases in data and algorithms, mitigating health disparities. We aim to investigate publicly available healthcare datasets to identify potential biases, and investigate the impact of these biases on the predictive performance of the models. The results indicate that bias in these datasets exerts a negative impact on the fairness of the learned models. In the context of a highly imbalanced dataset, we further investigate the impact of various imbalance handling techniques on both the performance and fairness of the models. This study underscores the importance of early detection of bias to mitigate the risk of introducing such biases in real-world applications, particularly within a sensitive domain, such as healthcare.