Individualized treatment rules (ITRs) for treatment recommendation is an important topic for precision medicine as not all beneficial treatments work well for all individuals. Interpretability is a desirable property of ITRs, as it helps practitioners make sense of treatment decisions, yet there is a need for ITRs to be flexible to effectively model complex biomedical data for treatment decision making. Many ITR approaches either focus on linear ITRs, which may perform poorly when true optimal ITRs are nonlinear, or black-box nonlinear ITRs, which may be hard to interpret and can be overly complex. This dilemma indicates a tension between interpretability and accuracy of treatment decisions. Here we propose an additive model-based nonlinear ITR learning method that balances interpretability and flexibility of the ITR. Our approach aims to strike this balance by allowing both linear and nonlinear terms of the covariates in the final ITR. Our approach is parsimonious in that the nonlinear term is included in the final ITR only when it substantially improves the ITR performance. To prevent overfitting, we combine cross-fitting and a specialized information criterion for model selection. Through extensive simulations, we show that our methods are data-adaptive to the degree of nonlinearity and can favorably balance ITR interpretability and flexibility. We further demonstrate the robust performance of our methods with an application to a cancer drug sensitive study.
Advances in large language models (LLMs) have driven an explosion of interest about their societal impacts. Much of the discourse around how they will impact social equity has been cautionary or negative, focusing on questions like "how might LLMs be biased and how would we mitigate those biases?" This is a vital discussion: the ways in which AI generally, and LLMs specifically, can entrench biases have been well-documented. But equally vital, and much less discussed, is the more opportunity-focused counterpoint: "what promising applications do LLMs enable that could promote equity?" If LLMs are to enable a more equitable world, it is not enough just to play defense against their biases and failure modes. We must also go on offense, applying them positively to equity-enhancing use cases to increase opportunities for underserved groups and reduce societal discrimination. There are many choices which determine the impact of AI, and a fundamental choice very early in the pipeline is the problems we choose to apply it to. If we focus only later in the pipeline -- making LLMs marginally more fair as they facilitate use cases which intrinsically entrench power -- we will miss an important opportunity to guide them to equitable impacts. Here, we highlight the emerging potential of LLMs to promote equity by presenting four newly possible, promising research directions, while keeping risks and cautionary points in clear view.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) often fail silently with over-confident predictions on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, posing risks in real-world deployments. Existing techniques predominantly emphasize either the feature representation space or the gradient norms computed with respect to DNN parameters, yet they overlook the intricate gradient distribution and the topology of classification regions. To address this gap, we introduce GRadient-aware Out-Of-Distribution detection in interpolated manifolds (GROOD), a novel framework that relies on the discriminative power of gradient space to distinguish between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. To build this space, GROOD relies on class prototypes together with a prototype that specifically captures OOD characteristics. Uniquely, our approach incorporates a targeted mix-up operation at an early intermediate layer of the DNN to refine the separation of gradient spaces between ID and OOD samples. We quantify OOD detection efficacy using the distance to the nearest neighbor gradients derived from the training set, yielding a robust OOD score. Experimental evaluations substantiate that the introduction of targeted input mix-upamplifies the separation between ID and OOD in the gradient space, yielding impressive results across diverse datasets. Notably, when benchmarked against ImageNet-1k, GROOD surpasses the established robustness of state-of-the-art baselines. Through this work, we establish the utility of leveraging gradient spaces and class prototypes for enhanced OOD detection for DNN in image classification.
High-order tensor methods for solving both convex and nonconvex optimization problems have generated significant research interest, leading to algorithms with optimal global rates of convergence and local rates that are faster than Newton's method. On each iteration, these methods require the unconstrained local minimization of a (potentially nonconvex) multivariate polynomial of degree higher than two, constructed using third-order (or higher) derivative information, and regularized by an appropriate power of regularization. Developing efficient techniques for solving such subproblems is an ongoing topic of research, and this paper addresses the case of the third-order tensor subproblem. We propose the CQR algorithmic framework, for minimizing a nonconvex Cubic multivariate polynomial with Quartic Regularisation, by minimizing a sequence of local quadratic models that incorporate simple cubic and quartic terms. The role of the cubic term is to crudely approximate local tensor information, while the quartic one controls model regularization and progress. We provide necessary and sufficient optimality conditions that fully characterise the global minimizers of these cubic-quartic models. We then turn these conditions into secular equations that can be solved using nonlinear eigenvalue techniques. We show, using our optimality characterisations, that a CQR algorithmic variant has the optimal-order evaluation complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ when applied to minimizing our quartically-regularised cubic subproblem, which can be further improved in special cases. We propose practical CQR variants that use local tensor information to construct the local cubic-quartic models. We test these variants numerically and observe them to be competitive with ARC and other subproblem solvers on typical instances and even superior on ill-conditioned subproblems with special structure.
Rational best approximations (in a Chebyshev sense) to real functions are characterized by an equioscillating approximation error. Similar results do not hold true for rational best approximations to complex functions in general. In the present work, we consider unitary rational approximations to the exponential function on the imaginary axis, which map the imaginary axis to the unit circle. In the class of unitary rational functions, best approximations are shown to exist, to be uniquely characterized by equioscillation of a phase error, and to possess a super-linear convergence rate. Furthermore, the best approximations have full degree (i.e., non-degenerate), achieve their maximum approximation error at points of equioscillation, and interpolate at intermediate points. Asymptotic properties of poles, interpolation nodes, and equioscillation points of these approximants are studied. Three algorithms, which are found very effective to compute unitary rational approximations including candidates for best approximations, are sketched briefly. Some consequences to numerical time-integration are discussed. In particular, time propagators based on unitary best approximants are unitary, symmetric and A-stable.
Classification of $N$ points becomes a simultaneous control problem when viewed through the lens of neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs), which represent the time-continuous limit of residual networks. For the narrow model, with one neuron per hidden layer, it has been shown that the task can be achieved using $O(N)$ neurons. In this study, we focus on estimating the number of neurons required for efficient cluster-based classification, particularly in the worst-case scenario where points are independently and uniformly distributed in $[0,1]^d$. Our analysis provides a novel method for quantifying the probability of requiring fewer than $O(N)$ neurons, emphasizing the asymptotic behavior as both $d$ and $N$ increase. Additionally, under the sole assumption that the data are in general position, we propose a new constructive algorithm that simultaneously classifies clusters of $d$ points from any initial configuration, effectively reducing the maximal complexity to $O(N/d)$ neurons.
Positive semidefinite (PSD) matrices are indispensable in many fields of science. A similarity measurement for such matrices is usually an essential ingredient in the mathematical modelling of a scientific problem. This paper proposes a unified framework to construct similarity measurements for PSD matrices. The framework is obtained by exploring the fiber bundle structure of the cone of PSD matrices and generalizing the idea of the point-set distance previously developed for linear subsapces and positive definite (PD) matrices. The framework demonstrates both theoretical advantages and computational convenience: (1) We prove that the similarity measurement constructed by the framework can be recognized either as the cost of a parallel transport or as the length of a quasi-geodesic curve. (2) We extend commonly used divergences for equidimensional PD matrices to the non-equidimensional case. Examples include Kullback-Leibler divergence, Bhattacharyya divergence and R\'enyi divergence. We prove that these extensions enjoy the same consistency property as their counterpart for geodesic distance. (3) We apply our geometric framework to further extend those in (2) to similarity measurements for arbitrary PSD matrices. We also provide simple formulae to compute these similarity measurements in most situations.
Any experiment with climate models relies on a potentially large set of spatio-temporal boundary conditions. These can represent both the initial state of the system and/or forcings driving the model output throughout the experiment. Whilst these boundary conditions are typically fixed using available reconstructions in climate modelling studies, they are highly uncertain, that uncertainty is unquantified, and the effect on the output of the experiment can be considerable. We develop efficient quantification of these uncertainties that combines relevant data from multiple models and observations. Starting from the coexchangeability model, we develop a coexchangable process model to capture multiple correlated spatio-temporal fields of variables. We demonstrate that further exchangeability judgements over the parameters within this representation lead to a Bayes linear analogy of a hierarchical model. We use the framework to provide a joint reconstruction of sea-surface temperature and sea-ice concentration boundary conditions at the last glacial maximum (19-23 ka) and use it to force an ensemble of ice-sheet simulations using the FAMOUS-Ice coupled atmosphere and ice-sheet model. We demonstrate that existing boundary conditions typically used in these experiments are implausible given our uncertainties and demonstrate the impact of using more plausible boundary conditions on ice-sheet simulation.
The focus of precision medicine is on decision support, often in the form of dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs), which are sequences of decision rules. At each decision point, the decision rules determine the next treatment according to the patient's baseline characteristics, the information on treatments and responses accrued by that point, and the patient's current health status, including symptom severity and other measures. However, DTR estimation with ordinal outcomes is rarely studied, and rarer still in the context of interference - where one patient's treatment may affect another's outcome. In this paper, we introduce the weighted proportional odds model (WPOM): a regression-based, approximate doubly-robust approach to single-stage DTR estimation for ordinal outcomes. This method also accounts for the possibility of interference between individuals sharing a household through the use of covariate balancing weights derived from joint propensity scores. Examining different types of balancing weights, we verify the approximate double robustness of WPOM with our adjusted weights via simulation studies. We further extend WPOM to multi-stage DTR estimation with household interference, namely dWPOM (dynamic WPOM). Lastly, we demonstrate our proposed methodology in the analysis of longitudinal survey data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health study, which motivates this work. Furthermore, considering interference, we provide optimal treatment strategies for households to achieve smoking cessation of the pair in the household.
Radiology reports are an instrumental part of modern medicine, informing key clinical decisions such as diagnosis and treatment. The worldwide shortage of radiologists, however, restricts access to expert care and imposes heavy workloads, contributing to avoidable errors and delays in report delivery. While recent progress in automated report generation with vision-language models offer clear potential in ameliorating the situation, the path to real-world adoption has been stymied by the challenge of evaluating the clinical quality of AI-generated reports. In this study, we build a state-of-the-art report generation system for chest radiographs, $\textit{Flamingo-CXR}$, by fine-tuning a well-known vision-language foundation model on radiology data. To evaluate the quality of the AI-generated reports, a group of 16 certified radiologists provide detailed evaluations of AI-generated and human written reports for chest X-rays from an intensive care setting in the United States and an inpatient setting in India. At least one radiologist (out of two per case) preferred the AI report to the ground truth report in over 60$\%$ of cases for both datasets. Amongst the subset of AI-generated reports that contain errors, the most frequently cited reasons were related to the location and finding, whereas for human written reports, most mistakes were related to severity and finding. This disparity suggested potential complementarity between our AI system and human experts, prompting us to develop an assistive scenario in which Flamingo-CXR generates a first-draft report, which is subsequently revised by a clinician. This is the first demonstration of clinician-AI collaboration for report writing, and the resultant reports are assessed to be equivalent or preferred by at least one radiologist to reports written by experts alone in 80$\%$ of in-patient cases and 60$\%$ of intensive care cases.
Interrogating the evolution of biological changes at early stages of life requires longitudinal profiling of molecules, such as DNA methylation, which can be challenging with children. We introduce a probabilistic and longitudinal machine learning framework based on multi-mean Gaussian processes (GPs), accounting for individual and gene correlations across time. This method provides future predictions of DNA methylation status at different individual ages while accounting for uncertainty. Our model is trained on a birth cohort of children with methylation profiled at ages 0-4, and we demonstrated that the status of methylation sites for each child can be accurately predicted at ages 5-7. We show that methylation profiles predicted by multi-mean GPs can be used to estimate other phenotypes, such as epigenetic age, and enable comparison to other health measures of interest. This approach encourages epigenetic studies to move towards longitudinal design for investigating epigenetic changes during development, ageing and disease progression.