historical bias

A type of bias that already exists in the world and has made its way into a dataset. These biases have a tendency to reflect existing cultural stereotypes, demographic inequalities, and prejudices against certain social groups. For example, consider a classification model that predicts whether or not a loan applicant will default on their loan, which was trained on historical loan-default data from the 1980s from local banks in two different communities. If past applicants from Community A were six times more likely to default on their loans than applicants from Community B, the model might learn a historical bias resulting in the model being less likely to approve loans in Community A, even if the historical conditions that resulted in that community's higher default rates were no longer relevant. See Fairness: Types of bias in Machine Learning Crash Course for more information.

Practitioners refer to historical bias when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.