Supervised Domain Adaptation Mitigates Cross-Ethnicity Prediction Error in Neuroimaging Based Cognitive Prediction

Abstract

Machine learning models are increasingly used to predict cognitive and clinical outcomes from neuroimaging data, yet challenges in fairness and generalizability remain. Large scale datasets are often racially and ethnically imbalanced, leading to systematic performance disparities, with models typically achieving higher accuracy for majority populations represented in the training data. In this study, we evaluated whether supervised domain adaptation methods including balanced weighting, two-stage TrAdaBoost, feature augmentation with SrcOnly prediction, and linear interpolation can mitigate these biases. Using the ABCD dataset, we assessed whether models trained on 80 MRI measures from White American participants could generalize more effectively to African American participants. All domain adaptation methods reduced prediction error for African American participants, particularly for MRI modalities with large baseline disparities (e.g., structural MRI), while offering limited improvements where initial gaps were smaller (e.g., functional connectivity). Among the approaches, balanced weighting performed best and remained stable and beneficial even when only 10 African American participants were used to adapt the original model trained exclusively on White American participants. These findings suggest that simple, low-cost strategies can effectively reduce cross-ethnic performance gaps and improve equity in predictive neuroimaging, offering a practical path forward for future neuroimaging predictive biomarkers.