arXiv:2601.10356cs.LG2026-01

为生理信号回归生成真实可解释的反事实数据,提升临床可信度。

EvoMorph: Counterfactual Explanations for Continuous Time-Series Extrinsic Regression Applied to Photoplethysmography

  • 用进化算法优化波形结构,生成符合生理规律的反事实信号。
  • 在3个PPG数据集上验证,反事实变化与模型预测敏感性高度相关。
  • 适合临床医生和研究人员用于评估模型不确定性与可解释性。

可穿戴设备实现了对光电容积脉搏波(PPG)等生理信号的连续、大规模监测,为数据驱动的临床评估提供了新机遇。时间序列外生回归(TSER)模型越来越多地利用PPG信号估计心率、呼吸频率和血氧饱和度等临床指标。然而,仅依赖单一预测结果不足以支持临床推理与信任:医生还需了解预测在生理合理波动下的稳定性,以及信号的现实可实现变化对预测的影响程度。反事实解释(CFE)能回答此类“如果…会怎样”的问题,但现有时间序列CFE方法多限于分类任务,忽略波形形态,且常生成不合理的生理信号,难以应用于连续生物医学时间序列。为此,我们提出EvoMorph——一种多目标进化框架,用于生成生理合理且多样化的TSER反事实样本。EvoMorph基于可解释信号特征定义形态感知目标,并通过变换保持波形结构。我们在三个PPG数据集(心率、呼吸频率、血氧饱和度)上评估了EvoMorph,对比最近邻反例基线。此外,在案例研究中,我们通过将反事实敏感性与自举集成不确定性及数据密度度量关联,验证其作为不确定性量化工具的有效性。总体而言,EvoMorph实现了对连续生物医学信号的生理感知反事实生成,支持不确定性感知的可解释性分析,推动了临床时间序列应用中的可信模型评估。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Wearable devices enable continuous, population-scale monitoring of physiological signals, such as photoplethysmography (PPG), creating new opportunities for data-driven clinical assessment. Time-series extrinsic regression (TSER) models increasingly leverage PPG signals to estimate clinically relevant outcomes, including heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation. For clinical reasoning and trust, however, single point estimates alone are insufficient: clinicians must also understand whether predictions are stable under physiologically plausible variations and to what extent realistic, attainable changes in physiological signals would meaningfully alter a model's prediction. Counterfactual explanations (CFE) address these "what-if" questions, yet existing time series CFE generation methods are largely restricted to classification, overlook waveform morphology, and often produce physiologically implausible signals, limiting their applicability to continuous biomedical time series. To address these limitations, we introduce EvoMorph, a multi-objective evolutionary framework for generating physiologically plausible and diverse CFE for TSER applications. EvoMorph optimizes morphology-aware objectives defined on interpretable signal descriptors and applies transformations to preserve the waveform structure. We evaluated EvoMorph on three PPG datasets (heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation) against a nearest-unlike-neighbor baseline. In addition, in a case study, we evaluated EvoMorph as a tool for uncertainty quantification by relating counterfactual sensitivity to bootstrap-ensemble uncertainty and data-density measures. Overall, EvoMorph enables the generation of physiologically-aware counterfactuals for continuous biomedical signals and supports uncertainty-aware interpretability, advancing trustworthy model analysis for clinical time-series applications.

反事实解释生理信号可解释性进化算法

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