Motivating the additional use of external validity: examining transportability in a model of glioblastoma multiforme

Despite the growing ubiquity of data in the medical domain, it remains difficult to apply results from experimental and observational studies to additional populations suffering from the same disease. Many methods are employed for testing internal validity; yet limited effort is made in testing generalizability, or external validity. The development of disease models often suffers from this lack of validity testing and trained models frequently have worse performance on different populations, rendering them ineffective. In this work, we discuss the use of transportability theory, a causal graphical model examination, as a mechanism for determining what elements of a data resource can be shared or moved between a source and target population. A simplified Bayesian model of glioblastoma multiforme serves as the example for discussion and preliminary analysis. Examination over data collection hospitals from the TCGA dataset demonstrated improvement of prediction in a transported model over a baseline model.