Audience: From July 3rd to July 5th, we held a three-day course on machine learning and predictive inference in partnership with NAMBARI, the Moi-Brown Partnership for HIV Biostatistics Training. We also held a two-day optional working group for social determinants from July 6th-7th.

Attendees: 44 trainees from multiple institutions in Kenya and across the African continent attended all days including professional statisticians, data analysts, informatics professionals, university faculty members, and graduate students in statistics, informatics, or data science working at universities, research centers, government ministries or NGOs focused on the analysis of health data.

Operations: Tuition-free and selection by application only. The workshop was held entirely in person at the Noble Conference Center in Eldoret, Kenya. During the short course from July 3rd-5th, trainees’ days consisted of a combination of lectures, presentations/case studies, and hands-on activities. The optional social determinants working group consisted of discussions surrounding relevant social determinants research and how to continue working on the development of a database which led to the formation of the working group.

Workshop Topics:

• Machine learning background and overview

• Machine learning workflows (training, testing, evaluation)

• Specific machine learning algorithms (Random forest, CART, etc.)

• Real-world challenges with machine learning implementation (generalizability, distribution shift, algorithmic fairness, etc.)

• Social Determinants and ML

Funding and financial support is provided by the Fogarty International Center of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) through grant U2RTW012121

Sessions led by Rumi Chunara, PhD; Ann Mwangim PhD, and Joseph Hogan, ScD.

Hands-on sessions facilitated by: Amos Okutse, MSc, and Rophence Ojiambo, MSc.

Workshop Slides:

NAMBARI-DSSD Machine Learning Workshop Read-World Challenges: Generalizability - Rumi Chunara, PhD

NAMBARI-DSSD Workshop Algorithmic Fairness Overview - Rumi Chunara, PhD

Social Determinants Working Group: Social Determinants Theory - Rumi Chunara. PhD

Social Determinants Working Group: Next Steps - Rumi Chunara, PhD

More to be added soon…

Further resources (papers corresponding to data used in hands-on activities): will be added soon…