Dementia Models Exhibit Socioeconomic Status Performance Disparities

Researchers at Mayo Clinic (JMIR Med Inform, 2026) analyzed two cohorts—the Mayo Clinic Study on Aging (n=3,041) and the Rochester Epidemiology Project (n=19,572)—to evaluate SES and sex bias in four ML models predicting 1-year dementia onset using 5-year EHR data. They found higher balanced error rates for lower SES groups, that the individual-level HOUSES index detects different biases than area-level ADI, and that SMOTE-NC oversampling reduced some disparities but sometimes worsened others.