Accurate sex prediction of cisgender and transgender individuals without brain size bias.

ABSTRACT: The increasing use of machine learning approaches on neuroimaging data comes with the important concern of confounding variables which might lead to biased predictions and in turn spurious conclusions about the relationship between the features and the target. A prominent example is the brain size difference between women and men. This difference in total intracranial volume (TIV) can cause bias when employing machine learning approaches for the investigation of sex differences in brain morphology. A TIV-biased model will not capture qualitative sex differences in brain organization but rather learn to classify an individual's sex based on brain size differences, thus leading to spurious and misleading conclusions, for example when comparing brain morphology between cisgender- and transgen

SUBMITTER: Wiersch L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10449927 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature