Bias Analysis in Healthcare Time-Series (BAHT) Decision Support Systems from Meta Data

One of the hindrances in the widespread acceptance of deep learning-based decision support systems in healthcare is bias. Bias in its many forms occurs in the datasets used to train and test deep learning models and is amplified when deployed in the real-world, leading to challenges such as model drift. Recent advancements in the field of deep learning have led to the deployment of deployable automated healthcare diagnosis decision support systems at hospitals as well as tele-medicine through IoT devices. Research has been focused primarily on the development and improvement of these systems leaving a gap in the analysis of the fairness. The domain of FAccT ML (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency) accounts for the analysis of these deployable machine learning systems. In this work, we present a framework for Bias Analysis in Healthcare Time-Series (BAHT) signals such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Electroencephalogram (EEG). BAHT provides a graphical interpretive analysis of bias in the training, testing datasets in terms of protected variables, and analysis of bias amplification by the trained model for time-series healthcare decision support systems. We thoroughly investigate three prominent time-series ECG and EEG healthcare datasets used for model training and research. We show the extensive presence of bias in the datasets leads to potentially biased or unfair machine learning models. Our experiments also demonstrate the amplification of identified bias with an observed maximum of 66.66%. We investigate the effect of model drift due to unanalyzed bias in datasets and algorithms. Bias mitigation though prudent, is a nascent area of research. We present experiments and analyze the most prevalently accepted bias mitigation strategies of under-sampling, oversampling, and the use of synthetic data for balancing the dataset through augmentation. It is important that healthcare models, datasets, and bias mitigation strategies should be properly analyzed for a fair unbiased delivery of service.