1,979 research outputs found
Responsible and Regulatory Conform Machine Learning for Medicine: A Survey of Challenges and Solutions
Machine learning is expected to fuel significant improvements in medical
care. To ensure that fundamental principles such as beneficence, respect for
human autonomy, prevention of harm, justice, privacy, and transparency are
respected, medical machine learning systems must be developed responsibly. Many
high-level declarations of ethical principles have been put forth for this
purpose, but there is a severe lack of technical guidelines explicating the
practical consequences for medical machine learning. Similarly, there is
currently considerable uncertainty regarding the exact regulatory requirements
placed upon medical machine learning systems. This survey provides an overview
of the technical and procedural challenges involved in creating medical machine
learning systems responsibly and in conformity with existing regulations, as
well as possible solutions to address these challenges. First, a brief review
of existing regulations affecting medical machine learning is provided, showing
that properties such as safety, robustness, reliability, privacy, security,
transparency, explainability, and nondiscrimination are all demanded already by
existing law and regulations - albeit, in many cases, to an uncertain degree.
Next, the key technical obstacles to achieving these desirable properties are
discussed, as well as important techniques to overcome these obstacles in the
medical context. We notice that distribution shift, spurious correlations,
model underspecification, uncertainty quantification, and data scarcity
represent severe challenges in the medical context. Promising solution
approaches include the use of large and representative datasets and federated
learning as a means to that end, the careful exploitation of domain knowledge,
the use of inherently transparent models, comprehensive out-of-distribution
model testing and verification, as well as algorithmic impact assessments
A Differentially Private Weighted Empirical Risk Minimization Procedure and its Application to Outcome Weighted Learning
It is commonplace to use data containing personal information to build
predictive models in the framework of empirical risk minimization (ERM). While
these models can be highly accurate in prediction, results obtained from these
models with the use of sensitive data may be susceptible to privacy attacks.
Differential privacy (DP) is an appealing framework for addressing such data
privacy issues by providing mathematically provable bounds on the privacy loss
incurred when releasing information from sensitive data. Previous work has
primarily concentrated on applying DP to unweighted ERM. We consider an
important generalization to weighted ERM (wERM). In wERM, each individual's
contribution to the objective function can be assigned varying weights. In this
context, we propose the first differentially private wERM algorithm, backed by
a rigorous theoretical proof of its DP guarantees under mild regularity
conditions. Extending the existing DP-ERM procedures to wERM paves a path to
deriving privacy-preserving learning methods for individualized treatment
rules, including the popular outcome weighted learning (OWL). We evaluate the
performance of the DP-wERM application to OWL in a simulation study and in a
real clinical trial of melatonin for sleep health. All empirical results
demonstrate the viability of training OWL models via wERM with DP guarantees
while maintaining sufficiently useful model performance. Therefore, we
recommend practitioners consider implementing the proposed privacy-preserving
OWL procedure in real-world scenarios involving sensitive data.Comment: 24 pages and 2 figures for the main manuscript, 5 pages and 2 figures
for the supplementary material
Countering Expansion and Organization of Terrorism in Cyberspace
Terrorists use cyberspace and social media technology to create fear and spread violent ideologies, which pose a significant threat to public security. Researchers have documented the importance of the application of law and regulation in dealing with the criminal activities perpetrated through the aid of computers in cyberspace. Using routine activity theory, this study assessed the effectiveness of technological approaches to mitigating the expansion and organization of terrorism in cyberspace. The study aligned with the purpose area analysis objective of classifying and assessing potential terrorist threats to preempt and mitigate the attacks. Data collection included document content analysis of the open-source documents, government threat assessments, legislation, policy papers, and peer-reviewed academic literature and semistructured interviews with fifteen security experts in Nigeria. Yin\u27s recommended analysis process of iterative and repetitive review of materials was applied to the documents analysis, including interviews of key public and private sector individuals to identify key themes on Nigeria\u27s current effort to secure the nation\u27s cyberspace. The key findings were that the new generation of terrorists who are more technological savvy are growing, cybersecurity technologies are effective and quicker tools, and bilateral/multilateral cooperation is essential to combat the expansion of terrorism in cyberspace. The implementation of recommendations from this study will improve the security in cyberspace, thereby contributing to positive social change. The data provided may be useful to stakeholders responsible for national security, counterterrorism, law enforcement on the choice of cybersecurity technologies to confront terrorist expansion, and organization in cyberspace
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