Invited talk: Irene Chen - Building Equitable Algorithms: Modeling Access to Healthcare in Disease Phenotyping

Advances in machine learning and the explosion of clinical data have demonstrated immense potential to fundamentally improve clinical care and deepen our understanding of human health. However, algorithms for medical interventions and scientific discovery in heterogeneous patient populations are particularly challenged by the complexities of healthcare data. Not only are clinical data noisy, missing, and irregularly sampled, but questions of equity and fairness also raise grave concerns and create additional computational challenges. In this talk, I examine how to incorporate differences in access to care into the modeling step. Using a deep generative model, we examine the task of disease phenotyping in heart failure and Parkinson's disease. The talk concludes with a discussion about how to rethink the entire machine learning pipeline with an ethical lens to building algorithms that serve the entire patient population.