Sample Selection Bias in Machine Learning for Healthcare

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chauhan, Vinod Kumar, Clifton, Lei, Salaün, Achille, Lu, Huiqi Yvonne, Branson, Kim, Schwab, Patrick, Nigam, Gaurav, Clifton, David A.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Chauhan, Vinod Kumar
Clifton, Lei
Salaün, Achille
Lu, Huiqi Yvonne
Branson, Kim
Schwab, Patrick
Nigam, Gaurav
Clifton, David A.
author_facet Chauhan, Vinod Kumar
Clifton, Lei
Salaün, Achille
Lu, Huiqi Yvonne
Branson, Kim
Schwab, Patrick
Nigam, Gaurav
Clifton, David A.
contents While machine learning algorithms hold promise for personalised medicine, their clinical adoption remains limited, partly due to biases that can compromise the reliability of predictions. In this paper, we focus on sample selection bias (SSB), a specific type of bias where the study population is less representative of the target population, leading to biased and potentially harmful decisions. Despite being well-known in the literature, SSB remains scarcely studied in machine learning for healthcare. Moreover, the existing machine learning techniques try to correct the bias mostly by balancing distributions between the study and the target populations, which may result in a loss of predictive performance. To address these problems, our study illustrates the potential risks associated with SSB by examining SSB's impact on the performance of machine learning algorithms. Most importantly, we propose a new research direction for addressing SSB, based on the target population identification rather than the bias correction. Specifically, we propose two independent networks(T-Net) and a multitasking network (MT-Net) for addressing SSB, where one network/task identifies the target subpopulation which is representative of the study population and the second makes predictions for the identified subpopulation. Our empirical results with synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets highlight that SSB can lead to a large drop in the performance of an algorithm for the target population as compared with the study population, as well as a substantial difference in the performance for the target subpopulations that are representative of the selected and the non-selected patients from the study population. Furthermore, our proposed techniques demonstrate robustness across various settings, including different dataset sizes, event rates, and selection rates, outperforming the existing bias correction techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_07841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sample Selection Bias in Machine Learning for Healthcare
Chauhan, Vinod Kumar
Clifton, Lei
Salaün, Achille
Lu, Huiqi Yvonne
Branson, Kim
Schwab, Patrick
Nigam, Gaurav
Clifton, David A.
Machine Learning
While machine learning algorithms hold promise for personalised medicine, their clinical adoption remains limited, partly due to biases that can compromise the reliability of predictions. In this paper, we focus on sample selection bias (SSB), a specific type of bias where the study population is less representative of the target population, leading to biased and potentially harmful decisions. Despite being well-known in the literature, SSB remains scarcely studied in machine learning for healthcare. Moreover, the existing machine learning techniques try to correct the bias mostly by balancing distributions between the study and the target populations, which may result in a loss of predictive performance. To address these problems, our study illustrates the potential risks associated with SSB by examining SSB's impact on the performance of machine learning algorithms. Most importantly, we propose a new research direction for addressing SSB, based on the target population identification rather than the bias correction. Specifically, we propose two independent networks(T-Net) and a multitasking network (MT-Net) for addressing SSB, where one network/task identifies the target subpopulation which is representative of the study population and the second makes predictions for the identified subpopulation. Our empirical results with synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets highlight that SSB can lead to a large drop in the performance of an algorithm for the target population as compared with the study population, as well as a substantial difference in the performance for the target subpopulations that are representative of the selected and the non-selected patients from the study population. Furthermore, our proposed techniques demonstrate robustness across various settings, including different dataset sizes, event rates, and selection rates, outperforming the existing bias correction techniques.
title Sample Selection Bias in Machine Learning for Healthcare
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07841