523 research outputs found
Assessing model performance for counterfactual predictions
Counterfactual prediction methods are required when a model will be deployed
in a setting where treatment policies differ from the setting where the model
was developed, or when the prediction question is explicitly counterfactual.
However, estimating and evaluating counterfactual prediction models is
challenging because one does not observe the full set of potential outcomes for
all individuals. Here, we discuss how to tailor a model to a counterfactual
estimand, how to assess the model's performance, and how to perform model and
tuning parameter selection. We also provide identifiability results for
measures of performance for a potentially misspecified counterfactual
prediction model based on training and test data from the same (factual) source
population. Last, we illustrate the methods using simulation and apply them to
the task of developing a statin-na\"{i}ve risk prediction model for
cardiovascular disease
Domain Generalization in Machine Learning Models for Wireless Communications: Concepts, State-of-the-Art, and Open Issues
Data-driven machine learning (ML) is promoted as one potential technology to
be used in next-generations wireless systems. This led to a large body of
research work that applies ML techniques to solve problems in different layers
of the wireless transmission link. However, most of these applications rely on
supervised learning which assumes that the source (training) and target (test)
data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d). This assumption is
often violated in the real world due to domain or distribution shifts between
the source and the target data. Thus, it is important to ensure that these
algorithms generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this context,
domain generalization (DG) tackles the OOD-related issues by learning models on
different and distinct source domains/datasets with generalization capabilities
to unseen new domains without additional finetuning. Motivated by the
importance of DG requirements for wireless applications, we present a
comprehensive overview of the recent developments in DG and the different
sources of domain shift. We also summarize the existing DG methods and review
their applications in selected wireless communication problems, and conclude
with insights and open questions
Automatic recognition of gait patterns in human motor disorders using machine learning: A review
Background: automatic recognition of human movement is an effective strategy to assess abnormal gait patterns. Machine learning approaches are mainly applied due to their ability to work with multidimensional nonlinear features. Purpose: to compare several machine learning algorithms employed for gait pattern recognition in motor disorders using discriminant features extracted from gait dynamics. Additionally, this work highlights procedures that improve gait recognition performance. Methods: we conducted an electronic literature search on Web of Science, IEEE, and Scopus, using “human recognition”, “gait patterns’’, and “feature selection methods” as relevant keywords. Results: analysis of the literature showed that kernel principal component analysis and genetic algorithms are efficient at reducing dimensional features due to their ability to process nonlinear data and converge to global optimum. Comparative analysis of machine learning performance showed that support vector machines (SVMs) exhibited higher accuracy and proper generalization for new instances. Conclusions: automatic recognition by combining dimensional data reduction, cross-validation and normalization techniques with SVMs may offer an objective and rapid tool for investigating the subject's clinical status. Future directions comprise the real-time application of these tools to drive powered assistive devices in free-living conditions.This work was supported by the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - with the reference scholarship SFRH/BD/108309/2015, and the reference project UID/EEA/04436/2013, by FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 - Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) - with the reference project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006941. Also, this work was partially supported by grant RYC-2014-16613 by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
Generalization Bounds and Representation Learning for Estimation of Potential Outcomes and Causal Effects
Practitioners in diverse fields such as healthcare, economics and education
are eager to apply machine learning to improve decision making. The cost and
impracticality of performing experiments and a recent monumental increase in
electronic record keeping has brought attention to the problem of evaluating
decisions based on non-experimental observational data. This is the setting of
this work. In particular, we study estimation of individual-level causal
effects, such as a single patient's response to alternative medication, from
recorded contexts, decisions and outcomes. We give generalization bounds on the
error in estimated effects based on distance measures between groups receiving
different treatments, allowing for sample re-weighting. We provide conditions
under which our bound is tight and show how it relates to results for
unsupervised domain adaptation. Led by our theoretical results, we devise
representation learning algorithms that minimize our bound, by regularizing the
representation's induced treatment group distance, and encourage sharing of
information between treatment groups. We extend these algorithms to
simultaneously learn a weighted representation to further reduce treatment
group distances. Finally, an experimental evaluation on real and synthetic data
shows the value of our proposed representation architecture and regularization
scheme
Machine Learning Methods for Personalized Medicine Using Electronic Health Records
The theme of this dissertation focuses on methods for estimating personalized treatment using machine learning algorithms leveraging information from electronic health records (EHRs). Current guidelines for medical decision making largely rely on data from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) studying average treatment effects. However, RCTs are usually conducted under specific inclusion/exclusion criteria, they may be inadequate to make individualized treatment decisions in real-world settings. Large-scale EHR provides opportunities to fulfill the goals of personalized medicine and learn individualized treatment rules (ITRs) depending on patient-specific characteristics from real-world patient data. On the other hand, since patients' electronic health records (EHRs) document treatment prescriptions in the real world, transferring information in EHRs to RCTs, if done appropriately, could potentially improve the performance of ITRs, in terms of precision and generalizability. Furthermore, EHR data domain usually consists text notes or similar structures, thus topic modeling techniques can be adapted to engineer features.
In the first part of this work, we address challenges with EHRs and propose a machine learning approach based on matching techniques (referred as M-learning) to estimate optimal ITRs from EHRs. This new learning method performs matching method instead of inverse probability weighting as commonly used in many existing methods for estimating ITRs to more accurately assess individuals' treatment responses to alternative treatments and alleviate confounding. Matching-based value functions are proposed to compare matched pairs under a unified framework, where various types of outcomes for measuring treatment response (including continuous, ordinal, and discrete outcomes) can easily be accommodated. We establish the Fisher consistency and convergence rate of M-learning. Through extensive simulation studies, we show that M-learning outperforms existing methods when propensity scores are misspecified or when unmeasured confounders are present in certain scenarios. In the end of this part, we apply M-learning to estimate optimal personalized second-line treatments for type 2 diabetes patients to achieve better glycemic control or reduce major complications using EHRs from New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH).
In the second part, we propose a new domain adaptation method to learn ITRs in by incorporating information from EHRs. Unless assuming no unmeasured confounding in EHRs, we cannot directly learn the optimal ITR from the combined EHR and RCT data. Instead, we first pre-train “super" features from EHRs that summarize physicians' treatment decisions and patients' observed benefits in the real world, which are likely to be informative of the optimal ITRs. We then augment the feature space of the RCT and learn the optimal ITRs stratifying by these features using RCT patients only. We adopt Q-learning and a modified matched-learning algorithm for estimation. We present theoretical justifications and conduct simulation studies to demonstrate the performance of our proposed method. Finally, we apply our method to transfer information learned from EHRs of type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients to improve learning individualized insulin therapies from an RCT.
In the last part of this work, we report M-learning proposed in the first part to learn ITRs using interpretable features extracted from EHR documentation of medications and ICD diagnoses codes. We use a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to extract latent topics and weights as features for learning ITRs. Our method achieves confounding reduction in observational studies through matching treated and untreated individuals and improves treatment optimization by augmenting feature space with clinically meaningful LDA-based features. We apply the method to extract LDA-based features in EHR data collected at NYPH clinical data warehouse in studying optimal second-line treatment for T2D patients. We use cross validation to show that ITRs outperforms uniform treatment strategies (i.e., assigning insulin or another class of oral organic compounds to all individuals), and including topic modeling features leads to more reduction of post-treatment complications
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