用嵌入模型提升姓氏推断种族的准确性,尤其改善冷门姓氏预测效果。
Using Embedding Models to Improve Probabilistic Race Prediction
- 用预训练文本嵌入将姓名转为向量,替代传统姓氏数据
- 全名嵌入模型使拉丁裔和亚裔预测准确率显著提升
- 适合研究社会不平等、缺乏个体种族数据的场景
估算种族差异需要个体层面的种族数据,但因敏感性常无法获取。现有研究多依赖贝叶斯改进姓氏地理编码(BISG),其基于人口普查姓氏数据,仅覆盖常见姓氏,遗漏约10%美国人口。标准BISG在罕见姓氏上表现差,因采用无信息通用先验。本文提出嵌入增强的BISG(eBISG),利用预训练文本嵌入表示姓名为稠密向量,并在2020年美国人口普查姓氏与名字数据上训练神经网络,以估计普查未涵盖姓名的种族概率。比较五种方法:仅姓氏标准BISG、结合名字概率的BIFSG、罕见姓氏的姓氏嵌入、姓与名联合嵌入,以及基于南方选民档案训练的全名嵌入模型。结果显示,每一步改进均提升预测性能,全名嵌入模型增益最大,尤其对普查中缺失姓氏的拉丁裔和亚裔群体。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Estimating racial disparity requires individual-level race data, which are often unavailable due to the sensitivity of collecting such information. To address this problem, many researchers utilize Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), which have critically relied on Census surname data. Unfortunately, these data capture race-surname relationships only for common surnames, omitting approximately 10% of the US population. We show that predictive performance degrades substantially for individuals with such omitted, uncommon surnames because standard BISG implementation relies on a uninformative generic prior in these cases. To address this limitation, we propose embedding-powered BISG (eBISG), which uses pre-trained text embeddings to represent names as dense vectors and trains neural networks on 2020 Census surname and first-name data to estimate race probabilities for names not covered in the Census. We compare five approaches: standard BISG using only surnames, BIFSG incorporating first name probabilities, surname embedding for unlisted names, surname and first name embedding combining both, and a full-name embedding trained on voter file data from Southern states that captures interactions between name components. We show that each successive eBISG approach improves race prediction, with the full-name embedding yielding the largest gains, particularly for Hispanic and Asian voters whose surnames are absent from the Census list.
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