Portrait of Aidan Licoppe

Aidan Licoppe

aidan.licoppe@mila.quebec
Master's Research - McGill University
Supervisor
David Buckeridge
Research Topics
Medical Machine Learning
GitHub

Publications

Assessing the effect of race on machine learning models predicting hospital admissions from emergency department
Aidan Licoppe
Lucy An
David L. Buckeridge
Antony Robert
James Man Git Tsui
Abstract Objectives Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly being developed to support healthcare delivery. However, concerns remain a… (see more)bout their potential to perpetuate existing biases rooted in the data used to develop them. We aim to assess the impact of using race in predicting hospital admission probabilities for patients visiting the emergency department (ED). Materials and Methods Data from the MIMIC-IV ED dataset were used to train2 ML models predicting hospital admission: one included race; the other did not. Differences in predicted admission probabilities were evaluated across racial groups under multiple validation conditions. Results Including race as a model input was associated with meaningful differences in predicted admission probabilities for White (3.2%), Black (−1.5%), and Hispanic (−3.0%) patients, while minimal differences were observed for Asian (0.2%) and Other (0.5%) patients. These differences were associated with large Cohen’s d effect sizes in the baseline model for White (d = 1.00), Black (d = −1.23), and Hispanic (d = −1.35) patients. After balancing racial group prevalence, the effects persisted for White (1.22%; d = 1.22) and Hispanic (−1.00%; d = −1.00) patients. Discussion These findings suggest that race is associated with differences in ML-based hospital admission predictions for ED patients, underscoring the need for caution when incorporating race into clinical prediction models and the importance of rigorous bias assessment. Conclusion As race was associated with predictions, there is a crucial need to address underlying social factors and the use of broader, more equitable clinical data for ML model training.
2026-08-09
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Open (published)
doi.org