A Comparison of Bias Mitigation Techniques for Educational Classification Tasks Using Supervised Machine Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) has become integral in educational decision-making through technologies such as learning analytics and educational data mining. However, the adoption of machine learning-driven tools without scrutiny risks perpetuating biases. Despite ongoing efforts to tackle fairness issues, their application to educational datasets remains limited. To address the mentioned gap in the literature, this research evaluates the effectiveness of four bias mitigation techniques in an educational dataset aiming at predicting students’ dropout rate. The overarching research question is: “How effective are the techniques of reweighting, resampling, and Reject Option-based Classification (ROC) pivoting in mitigating the predictive bias associated with high school dropout rates in the HSLS:09 dataset?" The effectiveness of these techniques was assessed based on performance metrics including false positive rate (FPR), accuracy, and F1 score. The study focused on the biological sex of students as the protected attribute. The reweighting technique was found to be ineffective, showing results identical to the baseline condition. Both uniform and preferential resampling techniques significantly reduced predictive bias, especially in the FPR metric but at the cost of reduced accuracy and F1 scores. The ROC pivot technique marginally reduced predictive bias while maintaining the original performance of the classifier, emerging as the optimal method for the HSLS:09 dataset. This research extends the understanding of bias mitigation in educational contexts, demonstrating practical applications of various techniques and providing insights for educators and policymakers. By focusing on an educational dataset, it contributes novel insights beyond the commonly studied datasets, highlighting the importance of context-specific approaches in bias mitigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".