#  When Personalization Harms Performance 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 22, 2024** 

 01:30PM - 02:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **SEC 3.301**  



 

 



 

**Speaker:** Berk Ustun (UCSD)  
  
**Title:** When Personalization Harms Performance  
 **Abstract:** Clinical prediction models often encode group attributes like sex, age, and HIV status for personalization – i.e., to assign more accurate predictions to heterogeneous subpopulations. In this talk, I will describe how such practices inadvertently lead to worsenalization, by assigning unnecessarily inaccurate predictions to minority groups. I will discuss how these effects violate our basic expectations from personalization in medical applications, and describe how they arise due to standard practices in algorithm development. I will end by highlighting work on how to address these issues in practice – first, by setting "personalization budgets" to test for worsenalization; second, by developing "participatory systems" where we can consent to share personal data at prediction time.  
  
**Papers**

 Suriyakumar, Ghassemi, Ustun. [When Personalization Harms Performance](https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/2206.02058.pdf__;!!Mih3wA!HuixOzujUnvbX51c6jE-73_YTMQp-bepYJUCDstta8EMXaOW_6ZU2FPluHhlOdfVLALVd7ynqts_%24). ICML 2023.

 Paes, Long, Ustun, Calmon. [On the Epistemic Limits of Personalized Prediction](https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/hash/0cfc9404f89400c5ed897035e0d3748c-Abstract-Conference.html__;!!Mih3wA!HuixOzujUnvbX51c6jE-73_YTMQp-bepYJUCDstta8EMXaOW_6ZU2FPluHhlOdfVLALVd8PhCn5b%24). NeurIPS 2022  
Joren, Nagpal, Heller, Ustun. [Participatory Personalization in Classification](https://openreview.net/forum?id=Wprz48rpgI). NeurIPS 2023



 

 



 

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