Login (DCU Staff Only)
Login (DCU Staff Only)

DORAS | DCU Research Repository

Explore open access research and scholarly works from DCU

Advanced Search

Intersectional Fairness in Healthcare AI: A Pipeline-Wide Evaluation of Multi-Stage Mitigation Strategies

Kennedy, Shane, Farayola, Michael Mayowa, Kelly, Daniel, Tal, Irina orcid logoORCID: 0000-0001-9656-668X, Saber, Takfarinas orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-2958-7979, Connolly, Regina orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-3196-2889 and Bendechache, Malika orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-0069-1860 (2025) Intersectional Fairness in Healthcare AI: A Pipeline-Wide Evaluation of Multi-Stage Mitigation Strategies. In: TRUST-AI: The European Workshop on Trustworthy AI. Organized as part of the European Conference of Artificial Intelligence - ECAI 2025, 25-26 Oct. 2025, Bologna, Italy.

Abstract
Fairness in AI systems is critical in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where biased predictions can exacerbate existing disparities. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of a three-stage fairness pipeline, integrating pre-processing (Disparate Impact Remover), in-processing (Exponentiated Gradient Reduction), and post-processing (Equalized Odds Optimization), on a real-world healthcare dataset from Ireland. We construct an intersectional demographic attribute to audit disparities across race, gender, and age. Our results show that multi-stage fairness interventions can reduce subgroup disparities with minimal loss in predictive performance. However, integrating fairness techniques may introduce fairness and performance trade-offs. These findings highlight the importance of holistic, intersectional fairness auditing and the need for careful design of fairnessenhancing pipelines in real-world applications.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Workshop
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Trustworthy AI, Algorithmic Fairness, Healthcare AI, Intersectional Bias, Multi-Stage Mitigation
Subjects:Computer Science > Artificial intelligence
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > DCU Business School
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
Published in: Proceedings of TRUST-AI 2025 - The European Workshop on Trustworthy AI co-located with the 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2025). .
Official URL:https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-4132/
Copyright Information:Authors
ID Code:32892
Deposited On:03 Jul 2026 10:40 by Tam Nguyen . Last Modified 03 Jul 2026 10:40
Documents

Full text available as:

[thumbnail of short20.pdf]
Preview
PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0
907kB
Downloads

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Archive Staff Only: edit this record