randomness
Diagnostics for Individual-Level Prediction Instability in Machine Learning for Healthcare
Miller, Elizabeth W., Blume, Jeffrey D.
In healthcare, predictive models increasingly inform patient-level decisions, yet little attention is paid to the variability in individual risk estimates and its impact on treatment decisions. For overparameterized models, now standard in machine learning, a substantial source of variability often goes undetected. Even when the data and model architecture are held fixed, randomness introduced by optimization and initialization can lead to materially different risk estimates for the same patient. This problem is largely obscured by standard evaluation practices, which rely on aggregate performance metrics (e.g., log-loss, accuracy) that are agnostic to individual-level stability. As a result, models with indistinguishable aggregate performance can nonetheless exhibit substantial procedural arbitrariness, which can undermine clinical trust. We propose an evaluation framework that quantifies individual-level prediction instability by using two complementary diagnostics: empirical prediction interval width (ePIW), which captures variability in continuous risk estimates, and empirical decision flip rate (eDFR), which measures instability in threshold-based clinical decisions. We apply these diagnostics to simulated data and GUSTO-I clinical dataset. Across observed settings, we find that for flexible machine-learning models, randomness arising solely from optimization and initialization can induce individual-level variability comparable to that produced by resampling the entire training dataset. Neural networks exhibit substantially greater instability in individual risk predictions compared to logistic regression models. Risk estimate instability near clinically relevant decision thresholds can alter treatment recommendations. These findings that stability diagnostics should be incorporated into routine model validation for assessing clinical reliability.
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Oxfordshire > Oxford (0.14)
- North America > United States > Virginia > Albemarle County > Charlottesville (0.04)
- Asia > Middle East > Saudi Arabia (0.04)
- Asia > India > Maharashtra > Mumbai (0.04)
- Research Report > New Finding (1.00)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (1.00)
Scaling Laws for Precision in High-Dimensional Linear Regression
Zhang, Dechen, Tang, Xuan, Liang, Yingyu, Zou, Difan
Low-precision training is critical for optimizing the trade-off between model quality and training costs, necessitating the joint allocation of model size, dataset size, and numerical precision. While empirical scaling laws suggest that quantization impacts effective model and data capacities or acts as an additive error, the theoretical mechanisms governing these effects remain largely unexplored. In this work, we initiate a theoretical study of scaling laws for low-precision training within a high-dimensional sketched linear regression framework. By analyzing multiplicative (signal-dependent) and additive (signal-independent) quantization, we identify a critical dichotomy in their scaling behaviors. Our analysis reveals that while both schemes introduce an additive error and degrade the effective data size, they exhibit distinct effects on effective model size: multiplicative quantization maintains the full-precision model size, whereas additive quantization reduces the effective model size. Numerical experiments validate our theoretical findings. By rigorously characterizing the complex interplay among model scale, dataset size, and quantization error, our work provides a principled theoretical basis for optimizing training protocols under practical hardware constraints.
Appendix A Proof of Theorem 2.1
We have the following lemma. Using the notation of Lemma A.1, we have E The third inequality uses the Lipschitz assumption of the loss function. Figure 10 supplements'Relation to disagreement ' at the end of Section 2. It shows an example where the behavior of inconsistency is different from disagreement. All the experiments were done using GPUs (A100 or older). The goal of the experiments reported in Section 3.1 was to find whether/how the predictiveness of The arrows indicate the direction of training becoming longer.
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
- Europe > Netherlands > South Holland > Delft (0.04)
- Europe > Netherlands > North Holland > Amsterdam (0.04)
- Health & Medicine > Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology (0.46)
- Government > Military (0.46)
- North America > Canada > Quebec > Montreal (0.04)
- Oceania > Australia > New South Wales > Sydney (0.04)
- North America > Canada > British Columbia > Vancouver (0.04)
- (5 more...)
- North America > United States > Arizona > Maricopa County > Phoenix (0.04)
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.04)
- Asia > China > Jiangsu Province > Nanjing (0.04)
- (13 more...)
- North America > United States > Arizona > Maricopa County > Phoenix (0.04)
- Europe > Sweden > Stockholm > Stockholm (0.04)
- Asia > China > Jiangsu Province > Nanjing (0.04)
- (13 more...)
- North America > United States > New York > Tompkins County > Ithaca (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
- North America > United States > Massachusetts (0.04)
- Asia > China > Hong Kong (0.04)
- North America > United States > California > Santa Clara County > Palo Alto (0.04)
- North America > United States > Indiana > Monroe County > Bloomington (0.04)
- (4 more...)
- Europe > Germany > Baden-Württemberg > Tübingen Region > Tübingen (0.04)
- North America > Dominican Republic (0.04)
- Europe > Croatia > Dubrovnik-Neretva County > Dubrovnik (0.04)
- Asia > Middle East > UAE > Abu Dhabi Emirate > Abu Dhabi (0.04)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (0.74)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.68)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Learning Graphical Models > Directed Networks > Bayesian Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (0.83)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Uncertainty > Bayesian Inference (0.82)