Toward Mitigating Sex Bias in Pilot Trainees' Stress and Fatigue Modeling

TL;DR

This study addresses sex bias in stress and fatigue modeling for pilot trainees, demonstrating that bias mitigation techniques significantly improve fairness metrics in predictive models.

Contribution

It introduces bias mitigation methods in stress/fatigue models for pilot trainees, highlighting their effectiveness in reducing demographic disparities.

Findings

Bias mitigation improves demographic parity by 88.31%.

Bias mitigation improves equalized odds by 54.26%.

Results are statistically significant.

Abstract

While researchers have been trying to understand the stress and fatigue among pilots, especially pilot trainees, and to develop stress/fatigue models to automate the process of detecting stress/fatigue, they often do not consider biases such as sex in those models. However, in a critical profession like aviation, where the demographic distribution is disproportionately skewed to one sex, it is urgent to mitigate biases for fair and safe model predictions. In this work, we investigate the perceived stress/fatigue of 69 college students, including 40 pilot trainees with around 63% male. We construct models with decision trees first without bias mitigation and then with bias mitigation using a threshold optimizer with demographic parity and equalized odds constraints 30 times with random instances. Using bias mitigation, we achieve improvements of 88.31% (demographic parity difference) and 54.26% (equalized odds difference), which are also found to be statistically significant.