The Impact of Bias on Drift Detection in AI Health Software

Despite the potential of AI in healthcare decision-making, there are also risks to the public for different reasons. Bias is one risk: any data unfairness present in the training set, such as the underrepresentation of certain minority groups, will be reflected by the model resulting in inaccurate predictions. Data drift is another concern: models trained on obsolete data will perform poorly on newly available data. Approaches to analysing bias and data drift independently are already available in the literature, allowing researchers to develop inclusive models or models that are up-to-date. However, the two issues can interact with each other. For instance, drifts within under-represented subgroups might be masked when assessing a model on the whole population. To ensure the deployment of a trustworthy model, we propose that it is crucial to evaluate its performance both on the overall population and across under-represented cohorts. In this paper, we explore a methodology to investigate the presence of drift that may only be evident in sub-populations in two protected attributes, i.e., ethnicity and gender. We use the BayesBoost technique to capture under-represented individuals and to boost these cases by inferring cases from a Bayesian network. Lastly, we evaluate the capability of this technique to handle some cases of drift detection across different sub-populations.