Abstract:Predictive policing systems that allocate patrol resources based solely on predicted crime risk can unintentionally amplify racial disparities through feedback driven data bias. We present FASE, a Fairness Aware Spatiotemporal Event Graph framework, which integrates spatiotemporal crime prediction with fairness constrained patrol allocation and a closed loop deployment feedback simulator. We model Baltimore as a graph of 25 ZIP Code Tabulation Areas and use 139,982 Part 1 crime incidents from 2017 to 2019 at hourly resolution, producing a sparse feature tensor. The prediction module combines a spatiotemporal graph neural network with a multivariate Hawkes process to capture spatial dependencies and self exciting temporal dynamics. Outputs are modeled using a Zero Inflated Negative Binomial distribution, suitable for overdispersed and zero heavy crime counts. The model achieves a validation loss of 0.4800 and a test loss of 0.4857. Patrol allocation is formulated as a fairness constrained linear optimization problem that maximizes risk weighted coverage while enforcing a Demographic Impact Ratio constraint with deviation bounded by 0.05. Across six simulated deployment cycles, fairness remains within 0.9928 to 1.0262, and coverage ranges from 0.876 to 0.936. However, a persistent detection rate gap of approximately 3.5 percentage points remains between minority and non minority areas. This result shows that allocation level fairness constraints alone do not eliminate feedback induced bias in retraining data, highlighting the need for fairness interventions across the full pipeline.
Abstract:Automated classification of clinical transcriptions into medical specialties is essential for routing, coding, and clinical decision support, yet prior work on the widely used MTSamples benchmark suffers from severe data leakage caused by applying SMOTE oversampling before train test splitting. We first document this methodological flaw and establish a leakage free benchmark across 40 medical specialties (4966 records), revealing that the true task difficulty is substantially higher than previously reported. We then introduce CLiGNet (Clinical Label Interaction Graph Network), a neural architecture that combines a Bio ClinicalBERT text encoder with a two layer Graph Convolutional Network operating on a specialty label graph constructed from semantic similarity and ICD 10 chapter priors. Per label attention gates fuse document and label graph representations, trained with focal binary cross entropy loss to handle extreme class imbalance (181 to 1 ratio). Across seven baselines ranging from TF IDF classifiers to Clinical Longformer, CLiGNet without calibration achieves the highest macro F1 of 0.279, with an ablation study confirming that the GCN label graph provides the single largest component gain (increase of 0.066 macro F1). Adding per label Platt scaling calibration yields an expected calibration error of 0.007, demonstrating a principled trade off between ranking performance and probability reliability. We provide comprehensive failure analysis covering pairwise specialty confusions, rare class behaviour, document length effects, and token level Integrated Gradients attribution, offering actionable insights for clinical NLP system deployment.
Abstract:Predictive policing systems that direct patrol resources based on algorithmically generated crime forecasts have been widely deployed across US cities, yet their tendency to encode and amplify racial disparities remains poorly understood in quantitative terms. We present a reproducible simulation framework that couples a Generative Adversarial Network GAN with a Noisy OR patrol detection model to measure how racial bias propagates through the full enforcement pipeline from crime occurrence to police contact. Using 145000 plus Part 1 crime records from Baltimore 2017 to 2019 and 233000 plus records from Chicago 2022, augmented with US Census ACS demographic data, we compute four monthly bias metrics across 264 city year mode observations: the Disparate Impact Ratio DIR, Demographic Parity Gap, Gini Coefficient, and a composite Bias Amplification Score. Our experiments reveal extreme and year variant bias in Baltimores detected mode, with mean annual DIR up to 15714 in 2019, moderate under detection of Black residents in Chicago DIR equals 0.22, and persistent Gini coefficients of 0.43 to 0.62 across all conditions. We further demonstrate that a Conditional Tabular GAN CTGAN debiasing approach partially redistributes detection rates but cannot eliminate structural disparity without accompanying policy intervention. Socioeconomic regression analysis confirms strong correlations between neighborhood racial composition and detection likelihood Pearson r equals 0.83 for percent White and r equals negative 0.81 for percent Black. A sensitivity analysis over patrol radius, officer count, and citizen reporting probability reveals that outcomes are most sensitive to officer deployment levels. The code and data are publicly available at this repository.