With the universal adoption of machine learning in healthcare, the potential for the automation of societal biases to further exacerbate health disparities poses a significant risk. We explore algorithmic fairness from the perspective of feature selection. Traditional feature selection methods identify features for better decision making by removing resource-intensive, correlated, or non-relevant features but overlook how these factors may differ across subgroups. To counter these issues, we evaluate a fair feature selection method that considers equal importance to all demographic groups. We jointly considered a fairness metric and an error metric within the feature selection process to ensure a balance between minimizing both bias and global classification error. We tested our approach on three publicly available healthcare datasets. On all three datasets, we observed improvements in fairness metrics coupled with a minimal degradation of balanced accuracy. Our approach addresses both distributive and procedural fairness within the fair machine learning context.

在普遍采用机器学习的医疗领域，自动化的社会偏见可能会加剧健康差距，我们探索了从特征选择的角度来解决算法公平性。传统的特征选择方法忽视了不同子群体之间这些因素的差异，而我们的公平特征选择方法考虑了所有人口群体的平等重要性。我们在三个公开可用的医疗数据集上测试了我们的方法，在这三个数据集上，我们观察到在公平性度量指标上的改善，同时平衡准确率仅有轻微下降。我们的方法解决了公平机器学习背景下的分配和程序公正性问题。

机器学习在医疗领域中公平特征选择的评估