Robust Mitigation of Age-Dependent Confounding Effects via Sample-Difficulty Decorrelation

ArXi:2605.19230v1 Announce Type: cross Age dependent performance disparities in medical image classification often arise because age acts as a confounder, linking imaging morphology with disease prevalence. In practice, disparities can manifest as overdiagnosis at ages where disease prevalence is higher and underdiagnosis at ages where prevalence is lower, and can worsen under train test shifts in the age distribution. Conventional mitigation approaches that enforce strict age invariance may suppress diagnostically meaningful information encoded in age.