Estimating Racial Disparities When Race is Not Observed

Abstract: Discovering and quantifying racial disparities is critical to ensuring equitable distribution of public goods and services, and building fair decision-making algorithms and processes.  But in many important contexts, data about race is not available at the individual level.  Methods exist to predict individuals' race from attributes like their name and location, but these tools create their own set of  statistical challenges, which if not addressed can significantly understate or overstate the size of racial disparities.  This talk will discuss these challenges and introduce new methodology to address them, allowing for accurate inference of racial disparities in datasets without racial information.  The authors have worked with the U.S. Treasury Department to apply the new method to millions of individual tax returns to estimate disparities in who claims the home mortgage interest deduction, the most expensive individual deduction in the federal tax code.

Mathematics

Audience: general audience

Comments: Cory McCartan is a Faculty Fellow at CDS and will join the Penn State Department of Statistics in July.  He works on methodological and applied problems in the social sciences, including gerrymandering, electoral reform, privacy of public data, and racial disparities.

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NYU CDS Math and Democracy Seminar

Series comments: The Math and Democracy Seminar features research on contact points between the mathematical sciences and the structure of democratic society. The purpose of the seminar is to stimulate mathematical activity on problems relating to democracy, and to foster interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematicians and other scholars and democratic stakeholders.

Examples of topics of interest include detection of gerrymandering, fairness and accountability of algorithms used in social decision-making, voting and apportionment theory, applications of statistics to discrimination law and the census, and mathematical modeling of democratic processes. The scope is not limited to these and is expected to expand as further applications emerge.

Seminars currently conducted via Zoom (with some events also in person). Look for links in individual talk descriptions.

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