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Main Authors: Dhaubhadel, Sayera, Mohd-Yusof, Jamaludin, McMahon, Benjamin H., Estrada, Trilce, Ganguly, Kumkum, Spannaus, Adam, Gounley, John P., Wu, Xiao-Cheng, Durbin, Eric B., Hanson, Heidi A., Bhattacharya, Tanmoy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01202
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author Dhaubhadel, Sayera
Mohd-Yusof, Jamaludin
McMahon, Benjamin H.
Estrada, Trilce
Ganguly, Kumkum
Spannaus, Adam
Gounley, John P.
Wu, Xiao-Cheng
Durbin, Eric B.
Hanson, Heidi A.
Bhattacharya, Tanmoy
author_facet Dhaubhadel, Sayera
Mohd-Yusof, Jamaludin
McMahon, Benjamin H.
Estrada, Trilce
Ganguly, Kumkum
Spannaus, Adam
Gounley, John P.
Wu, Xiao-Cheng
Durbin, Eric B.
Hanson, Heidi A.
Bhattacharya, Tanmoy
contents We present a global explainability method to characterize sources of errors in the histology prediction task of our real-world multitask convolutional neural network (MTCNN)-based deep abstaining classifier (DAC), for automated annotation of cancer pathology reports from NCI-SEER registries. Our classifier was trained and evaluated on 1.04 million hand-annotated samples and makes simultaneous predictions of cancer site, subsite, histology, laterality, and behavior for each report. The DAC framework enables the model to abstain on ambiguous reports and/or confusing classes to achieve a target accuracy on the retained (non-abstained) samples, but at the cost of decreased coverage. Requiring 97% accuracy on the histology task caused our model to retain only 22% of all samples, mostly the less ambiguous and common classes. Local explainability with the GradInp technique provided a computationally efficient way of obtaining contextual reasoning for thousands of individual predictions. Our method, involving dimensionality reduction of approximately 13000 aggregated local explanations, enabled global identification of sources of errors as hierarchical complexity among classes, label noise, insufficient information, and conflicting evidence. This suggests several strategies such as exclusion criteria, focused annotation, and reduced penalties for errors involving hierarchically related classes to iteratively improve our DAC in this complex real-world implementation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_01202
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Global explainability of a deep abstaining classifier
Dhaubhadel, Sayera
Mohd-Yusof, Jamaludin
McMahon, Benjamin H.
Estrada, Trilce
Ganguly, Kumkum
Spannaus, Adam
Gounley, John P.
Wu, Xiao-Cheng
Durbin, Eric B.
Hanson, Heidi A.
Bhattacharya, Tanmoy
Machine Learning
We present a global explainability method to characterize sources of errors in the histology prediction task of our real-world multitask convolutional neural network (MTCNN)-based deep abstaining classifier (DAC), for automated annotation of cancer pathology reports from NCI-SEER registries. Our classifier was trained and evaluated on 1.04 million hand-annotated samples and makes simultaneous predictions of cancer site, subsite, histology, laterality, and behavior for each report. The DAC framework enables the model to abstain on ambiguous reports and/or confusing classes to achieve a target accuracy on the retained (non-abstained) samples, but at the cost of decreased coverage. Requiring 97% accuracy on the histology task caused our model to retain only 22% of all samples, mostly the less ambiguous and common classes. Local explainability with the GradInp technique provided a computationally efficient way of obtaining contextual reasoning for thousands of individual predictions. Our method, involving dimensionality reduction of approximately 13000 aggregated local explanations, enabled global identification of sources of errors as hierarchical complexity among classes, label noise, insufficient information, and conflicting evidence. This suggests several strategies such as exclusion criteria, focused annotation, and reduced penalties for errors involving hierarchically related classes to iteratively improve our DAC in this complex real-world implementation.
title Global explainability of a deep abstaining classifier
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01202