Zero-shot meta-learning for small-scale data from human subjects

Abstract--While developments in machine learning led to impressive performance gains on big data, many human subjects data are, in actuality, small and sparsely labeled. Existing methods applied to such data often do not easily generalize to out-of-sample subjects. Instead, models must make predictions on test data that may be drawn from a different distribution, a problem known as zero-shot learning. To address this challenge, we develop an end-to-end framework using a meta-learning approach, which enables the model to rapidly adapt to a new prediction task with limited training data for out-of-sample test data. We use three real-world small-scale human subjects datasets (two randomized control studies and one observational study), for which we predict treatment outcomes for held-out treatment groups. Our model learns the latent treatment effects of each intervention and, by design, can naturally handle multitask predictions. However, these methods have had limited success in I. Though such studies remain the gold standard large amount of labeled data yet have limited capacity for of scientific discovery [1], [3], many are small and sparsely transferring knowledge [14], [15], hindering their ability to labeled due to regulatory challenges, ethical considerations generalize to complex yet small human subjects datasets and [4], data availability (e.g., investigating rare diseases [3]), tasks [16].