Behavioral Phenotyping for Predictive Model Equity and Interpretability in STEM Education

Predictive models are increasingly being deployed in social and behavioral applications in support of decision making that directly affects people’s lives. Given such high stakes, it is important to develop models with interpretable and defensible features, with decisions that are unbiased toward historically marginalized groups. In this work we investigate the use of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) for generating interpretable features in an educational setting, combined with a standard bias mitigation algorithm for training predictive models. Our application in this work is predicting enrollment in STEM degrees, and improving fairness of our models through bias mitigation. We perform our experiments on the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, and evaluate our results using both objective metrics and subjective interpretation of the NMF factors, or behavioral phenotypes. Our empirical results from these experiments suggest that NMF combined with bias mitigation can potentially be used to improve fairness measures while simultaneously aiding in interpretability.