SAFER: A Calibrated Risk-Aware Multimodal Recommendation Model for Dynamic Treatment Regimes
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jun 7, 2025
Abstract
Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) are critical to precision medicine,
optimizing long-term outcomes through personalized, real-time decision-making
in evolving clinical contexts, but require careful supervision for unsafe
treatment risks. Existing efforts rely primarily on clinician-prescribed gold
standards despite the absence of a known optimal strategy, and predominantly
using structured EHR data without extracting valuable insights from clinical
notes, limiting their reliability for treatment recommendations. In this work,
we introduce SAFER, a calibrated risk-aware tabular-language recommendation
framework for DTR that integrates both structured EHR and clinical notes,
enabling them to learn from each other, and addresses inherent label
uncertainty by assuming ambiguous optimal treatment solution for deceased
patients. Moreover, SAFER employs conformal prediction to provide statistical
guarantees, ensuring safe treatment recommendations while filtering out
uncertain predictions. Experiments on two publicly available sepsis datasets
demonstrate that SAFER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple
recommendation metrics and counterfactual mortality rate, while offering robust
formal assurances. These findings underscore SAFER potential as a trustworthy
and theoretically grounded solution for high-stakes DTR applications.