Related papers: The Discordance of Individual Risk Estimates and t…
The key concepts (calibration, discrimination, and discordance) important in understanding and comparing risk models are best conveyed graphically. To illustrate this, models predicting death and acute kidney injury in a large cohort of PCI…
We consider a patient risk models which has access to patient features such as vital signs, lab values, and prior history but does not have access to a patient's diagnosis. For example, this occurs in a model deployed at intake time for…
Risk assessment instruments are used across the criminal justice system to estimate the probability of some future behavior given covariates. The estimated probabilities are then used in making decisions at the individual level. In the…
Many biological, psychological and economic experiments have been designed where an organism or individual must choose between two options that have the same expected reward but differ in the variance of reward received. In this way,…
Stepwise regression building procedures are commonly used applied statistical tools, despite their well-known drawbacks. While many of their limitations have been widely discussed in the literature, other aspects of the use of individual…
Doctors use statistics to advance medical knowledge; we use a medical analogy to introduce statistical inference "from scratch" and to highlight an improvement. Your doctor, perhaps implicitly, predicts the effectiveness of a treatment for…
Background: Clinical prediction models for a health condition are commonly evaluated regarding performance for a population, although decisions are made for individuals. The classic view relates uncertainty in risk estimates for individuals…
Interest in targeted disease prevention has stimulated development of models that assign risks to individuals, using their personal covariates. We need to evaluate these models, and to quantify the gains achieved by expanding a model with…
The discussion on causality in human history dates back to ancient Greece, yet to this day, there is still no consensus. Fundamentally, this stems from the nature of human cognition, as understanding causality requires abstract tools to…
Estimating the effect of a change in a particular risk factor and a chronic disease requires information on the risk factor from two time points; the enrolment and the first follow-up. When using observational data to study the effect of…
Risk adjustment in health care aims to redistribute payments to insurers based on costs. However, risk adjustment formulas are known to underestimate costs for some groups of patients. This undercompensation makes these groups unprofitable…
Stratifying factors, like age and gender, can modify the effect of treatments and exposures on risk of a studied outcome. Several effect measures, including the relative risk, hazard ratio, odds ratio, and risk difference, can be used to…
Because many illnesses show heterogeneous response to treatment, there is increasing interest in individualizing treatment to patients [Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 66 (2009) 128--133]. An individualized treatment rule is a decision rule that…
Advanced classification algorithms are being increasingly used in safety-critical applications like health-care, engineering, etc. In such applications, miss-classifications made by ML algorithms can result in substantial financial or…
Human understanding of randomness and variation is shaped by a number of cognitive biases. Here we relate a lesser-known cognitive bias, the "outcome orientation", to medical questions and describe the harm that the outcome orientation can…
In this position and problem pitch paper, we offer a solution to the reference class problem in causal inference. We apply the Reconcile algorithm for model multiplicity in machine learning to reconcile heterogeneous effects in causal…
Reliable uncertainty estimation is one of the major challenges for medical classification tasks. While many approaches have been proposed, recently the statistical framework of conformal predictions has gained a lot of attention, due to its…
The use of machine learning systems to support decision making in healthcare raises questions as to what extent these systems may introduce or exacerbate disparities in care for historically underrepresented and mistreated groups, due to…
A common practice in evidence-based decision-making uses estimates of conditional probabilities P(y|x) obtained from research studies to predict outcomes y on the basis of observed covariates x. Given this information, decisions are then…
Until recently, there has been a consensus that clinicians should condition patient risk assessments on all observed patient covariates with predictive power. The broad idea is that knowing more about patients enables more accurate…