ML for child protection In the United States, one in seven chi | Big Data Science

ML for child protection
In the United States, one in seven children has been abused or neglected in the past year. US Child Protection Agencies receive several million reports of alleged neglect or abuse each year. Therefore, some agencies are implementing ML to help professionals review cases and determine which ones should be investigated next. But these ML models are useless if users don't understand and trust their results.
So a study from MIT and others has developed a visual analytics tool that uses bar charts to show how specific factors in a case affect the predicted risk of a child being homeless over the next two years. This risk assessment is based on over 100 demographic and historical factors, including parental age and criminal record. Having tested the created solution, the developers drew conclusions about the need to improve the visualization and interpretability of forecasts in order to avoid dangerous distortions in making important decisions.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/machine-learning-high-stakes-1028