Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yang, Yang, Pollak, Kathryn I., Chakraborty, Bibhas, Liu, Molei, Zhou, Doudou, Hong, Chuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07473
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911279551086592
author Yang, Yang
Pollak, Kathryn I.
Chakraborty, Bibhas
Liu, Molei
Zhou, Doudou
Hong, Chuan
author_facet Yang, Yang
Pollak, Kathryn I.
Chakraborty, Bibhas
Liu, Molei
Zhou, Doudou
Hong, Chuan
contents Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) phenotyping often relies on noisy proxy labels, which undermine the reliability of downstream risk prediction. Active learning can reduce annotation costs, but most rely on fixed heuristics and do not ensure that phenotype refinement improves prediction performance. Our goal was to develop a framework that directly uses downstream prediction performance as feedback to guide phenotype correction and sample selection under constrained labeling budgets. Materials and Methods: We propose Reinforcement-Enhanced Label-Efficient Active Phenotyping (RELEAP), a reinforcement learning-based active learning framework. RELEAP adaptively integrates multiple querying strategies and, unlike prior methods, updates its policy based on feedback from downstream models. We evaluated RELEAP on a de-identified Duke University Health System (DUHS) cohort (2014-2024) for incident lung cancer risk prediction, using logistic regression and penalized Cox survival models. Performance was benchmarked against noisy-label baselines and single-strategy active learning. Results: RELEAP consistently outperformed all baselines. Logistic AUC increased from 0.774 to 0.805 and survival C-index from 0.718 to 0.752. Using downstream performance as feedback, RELEAP produced smoother and more stable gains than heuristic methods under the same labeling budget. Discussion: By linking phenotype refinement to prediction outcomes, RELEAP learns which samples most improve downstream discrimination and calibration, offering a more principled alternative to fixed active learning rules. Conclusion: RELEAP optimizes phenotype correction through downstream feedback, offering a scalable, label-efficient paradigm that reduces manual chart review and enhances the reliability of EHR-based risk prediction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RELEAP: Reinforcement-Enhanced Label-Efficient Active Phenotyping for Electronic Health Records
Yang, Yang
Pollak, Kathryn I.
Chakraborty, Bibhas
Liu, Molei
Zhou, Doudou
Hong, Chuan
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Objective: Electronic health record (EHR) phenotyping often relies on noisy proxy labels, which undermine the reliability of downstream risk prediction. Active learning can reduce annotation costs, but most rely on fixed heuristics and do not ensure that phenotype refinement improves prediction performance. Our goal was to develop a framework that directly uses downstream prediction performance as feedback to guide phenotype correction and sample selection under constrained labeling budgets. Materials and Methods: We propose Reinforcement-Enhanced Label-Efficient Active Phenotyping (RELEAP), a reinforcement learning-based active learning framework. RELEAP adaptively integrates multiple querying strategies and, unlike prior methods, updates its policy based on feedback from downstream models. We evaluated RELEAP on a de-identified Duke University Health System (DUHS) cohort (2014-2024) for incident lung cancer risk prediction, using logistic regression and penalized Cox survival models. Performance was benchmarked against noisy-label baselines and single-strategy active learning. Results: RELEAP consistently outperformed all baselines. Logistic AUC increased from 0.774 to 0.805 and survival C-index from 0.718 to 0.752. Using downstream performance as feedback, RELEAP produced smoother and more stable gains than heuristic methods under the same labeling budget. Discussion: By linking phenotype refinement to prediction outcomes, RELEAP learns which samples most improve downstream discrimination and calibration, offering a more principled alternative to fixed active learning rules. Conclusion: RELEAP optimizes phenotype correction through downstream feedback, offering a scalable, label-efficient paradigm that reduces manual chart review and enhances the reliability of EHR-based risk prediction.
title RELEAP: Reinforcement-Enhanced Label-Efficient Active Phenotyping for Electronic Health Records
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07473