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Instability in clinical risk prediction models using deep learning

Daniel Lopez-Martinez
Alex Yakubovich
Martin Seneviratne
Akshit Tyagi
Ethan Steinberg
N. Lance Downing
Ron C. Li
Keith E. Morse
Nigam H. Shah
Ming-Jun Chen
Proceedings of the 2nd Machine Learning for Health symposium, PMLR (2022), pp. 552-565

Abstract

While it has been well known in the ML community that deep learning models suffer from instability, the consequences for healthcare deployments are under-characterised. We study the stability of different model architectures trained on electronic health records, using a set of outpatient prediction tasks as a case study. We show that repeated training runs of the same deep learning model on the same training data can result in significantly different outcomes at a patient level even though global performance metrics remain stable. We propose two stability metrics for measuring the effect of randomness of model training, as well as mitigation strategies for improving model stability.