Probabilistic Race and Ethnicity Prediction Using Group-Specific Name Lists

Abstract

Statistically valid estimation of racial and ethnic disparities often requires inferring the probability that an individual belongs to a particular racial or ethnic group given only their name and geographic location. The standard approach, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), relies on group population frequencies for each name. Although the U.S. Census Bureau provides such information for common names and a limited set of racial categories, comparable data do not exist for many racial and ethnic groups and are rarely available outside the U.S. We propose the list-powered BISG ($\ell$BISG) method, which can be used to derive calibrated group probabilities from group-specific name lists. These lists may be compiled based on expert knowledge or generated synthetically using large language models (LLMs), and thus may be subject to unknown biases. Representing names as embeddings, we treat list membership as a proxy prediction task and apply a correction based on proximal inference to recover the target group probabilities. We validate the method on U.S. voter files with self-reported race, on the full-count 1900 U.S. Census, and on the Lebanese voter registry. We find that LLM-generated name lists yield accurate and well-calibrated probabilities as well as precise disparity estimates comparable to those obtained using methods that require name-race data. Thus, $\ell$BISG substantially broadens the applicability of probabilistic race and ethnicity prediction to settings where name-race data are unavailable.