Understanding risk with FOTRES?

Abstract

The present paper examines the recidivism risk assessment instrument FOTRES, addressing the questions whether FOTRES provides us with an adequate understanding of risk, whether we actually understand FOTRES itself, and whether FOTRES is fair. The evaluation of FOTRES uses the criteria of empirical accuracy, representational accuracy, domain of validity, intelligibility, and fairness. This evaluation is compared to that of COMPAS, a different, much-discussed risk assessment instrument. The paper argues that FOTRES performs poorly in comparison to COMPAS with respect to some of the criteria, and that both FOTRES and COMPAS do not show a satisfactory performance with respect to other criteria.