aceAI-driven decision-making systems used to support institutional decisions in the public sector
Source article: Bridging the gap: Towards an expanded toolkit for AI-driven decision-making in the public sector
AI-driven decision-making systems are becoming instrumental in the public sector, with applications spanning areas like criminal justice, social welfare, financial fraud detection, and public health. While these systems offer great potential benefits to institutional decision-making processes, such as improved efficiency and reliability, these systems face the challenge of aligning machine learning (ML) models with the complex realities of public sector decision-making. In this paper, we examine five key challen…
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Barriers to private sector participation in public transportation by Thompson, Theodore A New York (State). Transit Program and Evaluation Bureau United States. Urban Mass Transportation Administration. Office of Planning Technology Sharing Program (U.S.). Public domain
This peer-reviewed paper from October 2024 examines why AI-driven decision-making systems becoming instrumental in the public sector often fail to translate predictive accuracy into better decisions, analyzing five challenges including distribution shifts, label bias, past decisions shaping data, competing objectives, and human-in-the-loop effects.
It matters because unreliable predictions in criminal justice, welfare, fraud detection and public health can cause direct harm, while the proposed shift toward decision-outcome modeling and stakeholder-aligned design remains guidance rather than evaluated deployment, leaving uncertainty about effectiveness across agencies.
- Paper identifies five misalignment challenges: distribution shifts, label bias, influence of past decision-making on data, competing objectives, and human-in-the-loop on model output side.
- Authors argue standard ML focus on predictive accuracy is insufficient and propose shifting to improving decision-making outcomes via counterfactual prediction and policy learning.
- Guidance emphasizes connecting model estimand to decision-maker's utility and incorporating external input from domain experts and stakeholders.
AI-driven decision-making systems in the public sector can deliver improved efficiency and reliability for institutional decision-making processes.
When deployed in criminal justice, social welfare, fraud detection and public health, standard ML models can produce unreliable and harmful predictions due to misalignment with public-sector realities.
The rundown
As of the October 2024 publication, the authors catalog five specific sources of misalignment and note that applications already span criminal justice, social welfare, financial fraud detection, and public health, with standard methods relying on assumptions that do not fully account for these complexities.
To address this, the paper proposes selecting modeling frameworks by how the model estimand connects to the decision-maker's utility, outlining technical methods for counterfactual prediction and policy learning and calling for external input from domain experts and stakeholders to align design choices with policy objectives.
Standard ML approaches may fail in public-sector contexts because their assumptions do not capture operational complexities.
Sources
- Peer-reviewedGovernment Information Quarterly2024-10-11
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