QDSP: An Interpretable Structured Learning Framework for Predicting Death or Cerebral Palsy in Very Low Birth Weight Infants
Very low birth weight infants (VLBWI) are at high risk of mortality and severe neurodevelopmental impairment, including cerebral palsy, yet reliable discharge-time prognostic stratification remains challenging in high-dimensional and data-limited clinical settings. To address this problem, we propose QDSP, an interpretable structured learning framework that integrates Quota-guided Subspace Sampling (QSS) and Differentiable-decision-guided Structure Perception (DSP). The QSS module constructs stability-aware and low-redundancy feature subspaces through bootstrap-based feature consistency estimation, whereas the DSP module employs differentiable soft oblique decision structures to model nonlinear clinical interactions while preserving traceable decision evidence. The proposed framework was evaluated on a real-world VLBWI cohort comprising 51 infants and further validated on three public medical tabular datasets. On the primary cohort, QDSP achieved an accuracy of 0.9200 and an AUC of 0.9714, outperforming representative machine learning and deep tabular learning baselines, including XGBoost, TabNet, and TabPFN. Across external datasets, QDSP maintained competitive discrimination and calibration under varying sample sizes and clinical distributions. In addition, SHAP-based analyses and differentiable decision-path tracing identified clinically relevant predictors, including cystic periventricular leukomalacia (cPVL) and birth weight, consistent with established neonatal pathophysiological evidence. These results suggest that QDSP provides an interpretable and robust framework for discharge-time risk stratification in VLBWI and may support early individualized clinical decision-making in neonatal intensive care settings.