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by gleb 3685 days ago
Are you sure what you found is not just Simpson's paradox?

When I look at the 2 KM plots for white/blacks, they are mostly the same. It's pretty clear that the model is not prejudiced against blacks, in fact it's somewhat prejudiced against whites. [1]

Your main editorial claim is that whites tend to be misclassified as "good" and blacks as "bad."

But I think what's actually happening is that algorithm is more likely to misclassify low_risk as "good", and high_risk as "bad".[2] Combine that with vastly more whites than blacks being low_risk (as you show earlier) and you get the observed "injustice".

I'll also note that the KM for whites flatten out at 2 years, unlike for blacks. This is actually a big deal if statistically significant. But that's a separate conversation.

Footnotes:

1 - this is acknowledged in methodology page "black defendants who scored higher did recidivate slightly more often than white defendants (63 percent vs. 59 percent)."

2 - why that is I don't yet fully understand (and I'd like to) but it looks's to be simple math that follows from low risk mostly not recidivating, and high risk mostly yes recidivating