GUESS: projecting machine learning scores to well-calibrated probability estimates for clinical decision-making.

Journal: Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)
Published Date:

Abstract

MOTIVATION: Clinical decision support systems have been applied in numerous fields, ranging from cancer survival toward drug resistance prediction. Nevertheless, clinical decision support systems typically have a caveat: many of them are perceived as black-boxes by non-experts and, unfortunately, the obtained scores cannot usually be interpreted as class probability estimates. In probability-focused medical applications, it is not sufficient to perform well with regards to discrimination and, consequently, various calibration methods have been developed to enable probabilistic interpretation. The aims of this study were (i) to develop a tool for fast and comparative analysis of different calibration methods, (ii) to demonstrate their limitations for the use on clinical data and (iii) to introduce our novel method GUESS.

Authors

  • Johanna Schwarz
  • Dominik Heider
    Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany.