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Diagnostics for Individual-Level Prediction Instability in Machine Learning for Healthcare

Miller, Elizabeth W., Blume, Jeffrey D.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

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.


Scaling Laws for Precision in High-Dimensional Linear Regression

Zhang, Dechen, Tang, Xuan, Liang, Yingyu, Zou, Difan

arXiv.org Machine Learning

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

Neural Information Processing Systems

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.



Debiasing Conditional Stochastic Optimization Lie He

Neural Information Processing Systems

The sample-averaged gradient of the CSO objective is biased due to its nested structure, and therefore requires a high sample complexity for convergence. We introduce a general stochastic extrapolation technique that effectively reduces the bias.




Fast Channel Simulation via Error-Correcting Codes

Neural Information Processing Systems

We show how techniques from the theory of error-correcting codes can be applied to achieve scalability and hence improved performance. As an exemplar, we focus on how polar codes can be used to efficiently simulate i.i.d.