[marchenko]

Journalists may not be using the term bias in a statistically appropriate way, but they do seem to be capturing a colloquial sense of what bothers people about these models: the potential for the individual to be subsumed into his demographic, and the use of suspect classifications (like race in the US) as highly salient but 'silent' factors in the model. I don't think this is a misleading use of the term for the average reader, whom I suspect would consider the FICO redlining example as exhibiting 'bias' as the term is commonly understood by laypersons. The fact that these models are difficult to understand and interrogate for the average citizen is not exactly a point in their favor, since a lot of consensual governance is based on transparency and information symmetry, even at the expense of optimization/efficiency.