The Atlanta Fire Rescue Department (AFRD), like many municipal fire departments, actively works to reduce fire risk by inspecting commercial properties for potential hazards and fire code violations. However, AFRD's fire inspection practices relied on tradition and intuition, with no existing data-driven process for prioritizing fire inspections or identifying new properties requiring inspection. In collaboration with AFRD, we developed the Firebird framework to help municipal fire departments identify and prioritize commercial property fire inspections, using machine learning, geocoding, and information visualization. Firebird computes fire risk scores for over 5,000 buildings in the city, with true positive rates of up to 71 in predicting fires. It has identified 6,096 new potential commercial properties to inspect, based on AFRD's criteria for inspection. Furthermore, through an interactive map, Firebird integrates and visualizes fire incidents, property information and risk scores to help AFRD make informed decisions about fire inspections. Firebird has already begun to make positive impact at both local and national levels. It is improving AFRD's inspection processes and Atlanta residents' safety, and was highlighted by National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) as a best practice for using data to inform fire inspections.
Risk prediction models have been widely used in many domains, including health care @cite_2 , student performance evaluation @cite_19 , and accounting fraud detection @cite_18 . However, urban fire risk prediction has received relatively less attention, despite its obvious importance.
@cite_19 @cite_18 @cite_2
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Many prediction tasks contain uncertainty. In some cases, uncertainty is inherent in the task itself. In future prediction, for example, many distinct outcomes are equally valid. In other cases, uncertainty arises from the way data is labeled. For example, in object detection, many objects of interest often go unlabeled, and in human pose estimation, occluded joints are often labeled with ambiguous values. In this work we focus on a principled approach for handling such scenarios. In particular, we propose a frame-work for reformulating existing single-prediction models as multiple hypothesis prediction (MHP) models and an associated meta loss and optimization procedure to train them. To demonstrate our approach, we consider four diverse applications: human pose estimation, future prediction, image classification and segmentation. We find that MHP models outperform their single-hypothesis counterparts in all cases, and that MHP models simultaneously expose valuable insights into the variability of predictions. Black-box risk scoring models permeate our lives, yet are typically proprietary and opaque. We propose a transparent model distillation approach to detect bias in such models. Model distillation was originally designed to distill knowledge from a large, complex teacher model to a faster, simpler student model without significant loss in prediction accuracy. We add a third restriction - transparency. In this paper we use data sets that contain two labels to train on: the risk score predicted by a black-box model, as well as the actual outcome the risk score was intended to predict. This allows us to compare models that predict each label. For a particular class of student models - interpretable tree additive models with pairwise interactions (GA2Ms) - we provide confidence intervals for the difference between the risk score and actual outcome models. This presents a new method for detecting bias in black-box risk scores by assessing if contributions of protected features to the risk score are statistically different from their contributions to the actual outcome. Black-box risk scoring models permeate our lives, yet are typically proprietary or opaque. We propose a transparent model distillation approach to audit such models. Model distillation was first introduced to transfer knowledge from a large, complex teacher model to a faster, simpler student model without significant loss in prediction accuracy. To this we add a third criterion - transparency. To gain insight into black-box models, we treat them as teachers, training transparent student models to mimic the risk scores assigned by the teacher. Moreover, we use side information in the form of the actual outcomes the teacher scoring model was intended to predict in the first place. By training a second transparent model on the outcomes, we can compare the two models to each other. When comparing models trained on risk scores to models trained on outcomes, we show that it is necessary to calibrate the risk-scoring model's predictions to remove distortion that may have been added to the black-box risk-scoring model during or after its training process. We also show how to compute confidence intervals for the particular class of transparent student models we use - tree-based additive models with pairwise interactions (GA2Ms) - to support comparison of the two transparent models. We demonstrate the methods on four public datasets: COMPAS, Lending Club, Stop-and-Frisk, and Chicago Police. Context Predicting hospital readmission risk is of great interest to identify which patients would benefit most from care transition interventions, as well as to risk-adjust readmission rates for the purposes of hospital comparison. Objective To summarize validated readmission risk prediction models, describe their performance, and assess suitability for clinical or administrative use. Data Sources and Study Selection The databases of MEDLINE, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library were searched from inception through March 2011, the EMBASE database was searched through August 2011, and hand searches were performed of the retrieved reference lists. Dual review was conducted to identify studies published in the English language of prediction models tested with medical patients in both derivation and validation cohorts. Data Extraction Data were extracted on the population, setting, sample size, follow-up interval, readmission rate, model discrimination and calibration, type of data used, and timing of data collection. Data Synthesis Of 7843 citations reviewed, 30 studies of 26 unique models met the inclusion criteria. The most common outcome used was 30-day readmission; only 1 model specifically addressed preventable readmissions. Fourteen models that relied on retrospective administrative data could be potentially used to risk-adjust readmission rates for hospital comparison; of these, 9 were tested in large US populations and had poor discriminative ability (c statistic range: 0.55-0.65). Seven models could potentially be used to identify high-risk patients for intervention early during a hospitalization (c statistic range: 0.56-0.72), and 5 could be used at hospital discharge (c statistic range: 0.68-0.83). Six studies compared different models in the same population and 2 of these found that functional and social variables improved model discrimination. Although most models incorporated variables for medical comorbidity and use of prior medical services, few examined variables associated with overall health and function, illness severity, or social determinants of health. Conclusions Most current readmission risk prediction models that were designed for either comparative or clinical purposes perform poorly. Although in certain settings such models may prove useful, efforts to improve their performance are needed as use becomes more widespread.