On Aligning Prediction Models with Clinical Experiential Learning: A Prostate Cancer Case Study

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vallon, Jacqueline J., Overman, William, Xu, Wanqiao, Panjwani, Neil, Ling, Xi, Vij, Sushmita, Bagshaw, Hilary P., Leppert, John T., Shah, Sumit, Sonn, Geoffrey, Srinivas, Sandy, Pollom, Erqi, Buyyounouski, Mark K., Bayati, Mohsen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912570187710464
author Vallon, Jacqueline J.
Overman, William
Xu, Wanqiao
Panjwani, Neil
Ling, Xi
Vij, Sushmita
Bagshaw, Hilary P.
Leppert, John T.
Shah, Sumit
Sonn, Geoffrey
Srinivas, Sandy
Pollom, Erqi
Buyyounouski, Mark K.
Bayati, Mohsen
author_facet Vallon, Jacqueline J.
Overman, William
Xu, Wanqiao
Panjwani, Neil
Ling, Xi
Vij, Sushmita
Bagshaw, Hilary P.
Leppert, John T.
Shah, Sumit
Sonn, Geoffrey
Srinivas, Sandy
Pollom, Erqi
Buyyounouski, Mark K.
Bayati, Mohsen
contents Over the past decade, the use of machine learning (ML) models in healthcare applications has rapidly increased. Despite high performance, modern ML models do not always capture patterns the end user requires. For example, a model may predict a non-monotonically decreasing relationship between cancer stage and survival, keeping all other features fixed. In this paper, we present a reproducible framework for investigating this misalignment between model behavior and clinical experiential learning, focusing on the effects of underspecification of modern ML pipelines. In a prostate cancer outcome prediction case study, we first identify and address these inconsistencies by incorporating clinical knowledge, collected by a survey, via constraints into the ML model, and subsequently analyze the impact on model performance and behavior across degrees of underspecification. The approach shows that aligning the ML model with clinical experiential learning is possible without compromising performance. Motivated by recent literature in generative AI, we further examine the feasibility of a feedback-driven alignment approach in non-generative AI clinical risk prediction models through a randomized experiment with clinicians. Our findings illustrate that, by eliciting clinicians' model preferences using our proposed methodology, the larger the difference in how the constrained and unconstrained models make predictions for a patient, the more apparent the difference is in clinical interpretation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04053
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Aligning Prediction Models with Clinical Experiential Learning: A Prostate Cancer Case Study
Vallon, Jacqueline J.
Overman, William
Xu, Wanqiao
Panjwani, Neil
Ling, Xi
Vij, Sushmita
Bagshaw, Hilary P.
Leppert, John T.
Shah, Sumit
Sonn, Geoffrey
Srinivas, Sandy
Pollom, Erqi
Buyyounouski, Mark K.
Bayati, Mohsen
Machine Learning
Over the past decade, the use of machine learning (ML) models in healthcare applications has rapidly increased. Despite high performance, modern ML models do not always capture patterns the end user requires. For example, a model may predict a non-monotonically decreasing relationship between cancer stage and survival, keeping all other features fixed. In this paper, we present a reproducible framework for investigating this misalignment between model behavior and clinical experiential learning, focusing on the effects of underspecification of modern ML pipelines. In a prostate cancer outcome prediction case study, we first identify and address these inconsistencies by incorporating clinical knowledge, collected by a survey, via constraints into the ML model, and subsequently analyze the impact on model performance and behavior across degrees of underspecification. The approach shows that aligning the ML model with clinical experiential learning is possible without compromising performance. Motivated by recent literature in generative AI, we further examine the feasibility of a feedback-driven alignment approach in non-generative AI clinical risk prediction models through a randomized experiment with clinicians. Our findings illustrate that, by eliciting clinicians' model preferences using our proposed methodology, the larger the difference in how the constrained and unconstrained models make predictions for a patient, the more apparent the difference is in clinical interpretation.
title On Aligning Prediction Models with Clinical Experiential Learning: A Prostate Cancer Case Study
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04053