arXiv:2602.06611cs.LG2026-02

提出自适应因果正则化方法,平衡医疗预测的准确性和因果鲁棒性。

Adaptive-CaRe: Adaptive Causal Regularization for Robust Outcome Prediction

  • 通过特征统计贡献与因果贡献的差异设计正则项,动态调节模型偏好。
  • 在合成数据上保持高预测精度的同时识别出更稳健的预测因子。
  • 适用于需兼顾预测性能与因果稳定性的临床决策场景。

准确预测临床结局对医疗决策和个性化治疗至关重要。现有监督学习模型虽能提升预测精度,但易捕捉虚假相关性而非稳健预测因子;而因果结构学习方法虽具鲁棒性,却因算法与数据假设过于保守,导致诊断精度下降。为此,本文提出一种模型无关的正则化策略 Adaptive-CaRe,通过引入与输入特征统计贡献和因果贡献差异成比例的惩罚项,在预测价值与因果鲁棒性之间取得平衡。合成数据实验验证了该正则器在识别稳健预测因子的同时维持良好预测精度。标准因果基准测试表明,通过调节正则强度λ,可系统性调控预测准确率与因果鲁棒性的权衡。真实世界数据验证显示其结果可在实际医疗场景中有效迁移。因此,Adaptive-CaRe 提供了一种简单而有效的解决方案,应对医疗领域长期存在的预测精度与因果稳定性之间的矛盾。未来工作将探索更复杂的因果框架与分类模型,以深化大规模应用洞察。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurate prediction of outcomes is crucial for clinical decision-making and personalized patient care. Supervised machine learning algorithms, which are commonly used for outcome prediction in the medical domain, optimize for predictive accuracy, which can result in models latching onto spurious correlations instead of robust predictors. Causal structure learning methods on the other hand have the potential to provide robust predictors for the target, but can be too conservative because of algorithmic and data assumptions, resulting in loss of diagnostic precision. Therefore, we propose a novel model-agnostic regularization strategy, Adaptive-CaRe, for generalized outcome prediction in the medical domain. Adaptive-CaRe strikes a balance between both predictive value and causal robustness by incorporating a penalty that is proportional to the difference between the estimated statistical contribution and estimated causal contribution of the input features for model predictions. Our experiments on synthetic data establish the efficacy of the proposed Adaptive-CaRe regularizer in finding robust predictors for the target while maintaining competitive predictive accuracy. With experiments on a standard causal benchmark, we provide a blueprint for navigating the trade-off between predictive accuracy and causal robustness by tweaking the regularization strength, $λ$. Validation using real-world dataset confirms that the results translate to practical, real-domain settings. Therefore, Adaptive-CaRe provides a simple yet effective solution to the long-standing trade-off between predictive accuracy and causal robustness in the medical domain. Future work would involve studying alternate causal structure learning frameworks and complex classification models to provide deeper insights at a larger scale.

医疗预测因果推理正则化模型鲁棒性

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。