A fairness assessment of mobility-based COVID-19 case prediction models

In light of the outbreak of COVID-19, analyzing and measuring human mobility has become increasingly important. A wide range of studies have explored spatiotemporal trends over time, examined associations with other variables, evaluated non-pharmacologic interventions (NPIs), and predicted or simulated COVID-19 spread using mobility data. Despite the benefits of publicly available mobility data, a key question remains unanswered: are models using mobility data performing equitably across demographic groups? We hypothesize that bias in the mobility data used to train the predictive models might lead to unfairly less accurate predictions for certain demographic groups. To test our hypothesis, we applied two mobility-based COVID infection prediction models at the county level in the United States using SafeGraph data, and correlated model performance with sociodemographic traits. Findings revealed that there is a systematic bias in models’ performance toward certain demographic characteristics. Specifically, the models tend to favor large, highly educated, wealthy, young, and urban counties. We hypothesize that the mobility data currently used by many predictive models tends to capture less information about older, poorer, less educated and people from rural regions, which in turn negatively impacts the accuracy of the COVID-19 prediction in these areas. Ultimately, this study points to the need of improved data collection and sampling approaches that allow for an accurate representation of the mobility patterns across demographic groups.