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arXiv · 2011.03274

Trust Issues: Uncertainty Estimation Does Not Enable Reliable OOD Detection On Medical Tabular Data

Dennis Ulmer·Lotta Meijerink·Giovanni Cinà
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Abstract

When deploying machine learning models in high-stakes real-world environments such as health care, it is crucial to accurately assess the uncertainty concerning a model's prediction on abnormal inputs. However, there is a scarcity of literature analyzing this problem on medical data, especially on mixed-type tabular data such as Electronic Health Records. We close this gap by presenting a series of tests including a large variety of contemporary uncertainty estimation techniques, in order to determine whether they are able to identify out-of-distribution (OOD) patients. In contrast to previous work, we design tests on realistic and clinically relevant OOD groups, and run experiments on real-world medical data. We find that almost all techniques fail to achieve convincing results, partly disagreeing with earlier findings.

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Dennis Ulmer, Lotta Meijerink, Giovanni Cinà. 2020-11-06. Trust Issues: Uncertainty Estimation Does Not Enable Reliable OOD Detection On Medical Tabular Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03274

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