Fairness in TabNet Model by Disentangled Representation for the Prediction of Hospital No-Show

Patient no-shows is a major burden for health centers leading to loss of revenue, increased waiting time and deteriorated health outcome. Developing machine learning (ML) models for the prediction of no -shows could help addressing this important issue. It is crucial to consider fair ML models for no-show prediction in order to ensure equality of opportunity in accessing healthcare services. In this wo rk, we are interested in developing deep learning models for no-show prediction based on tabular data while ensuring fairness properties. Our baseline model, TabNet, uses on attentive feature transforme rs and has shown promising results for tabular data. We propose Fair-TabNet based on representation learning that disentangles predictive from sensitive components. The model is trained to jointly min imize loss functions on no-shows and sensitive variables while ensuring that the sensitive and prediction representations are orthogonal. In the experimental analysis, we used a hospital dataset of 210, 000 appointments collected in 2019. Our preliminary results show that the proposed Fair-TabNet improves the predictive, fairness performance and convergence speed over TabNet for the task of appointment no-show prediction. The comparison with the state-of-the art models for tabular data shows promising results and could be further improved by a better tuning of hyper-parameters.