CED: A case-level explainable paramedical diagnosis via AdaGBDT

The rapid growth of medical data has greatly promoted the wide exploitation of machine learning for paramedical diagnosis. Inversely proportional to their performance, most machine learning models generally suffer from the lack of explainability, especially the local explainability of the model, that is, the case-specific explainability.

In this paper, we proposed a GBDT (Gradient Boosting Decision Tree)-based explainable model for case-specific paramedical diagnostics, and mainly make the following contributions: (1) an adaptive gradient boosting decision tree (AdaGBDT) model is proposed to boost the path-mining for decision effectively; (2) to learn a case-specific feature importance embedding for a specific patient, the bi-side mutual information is applied to characterize the backtracking on the decision path; (3) through the collaborative decision-making by globally explainable AdaGBDT with case-based reasoning (CBR) in the case-specific metric space, some hard cases can be identified by the means of visualized interpretation. The performance of our model is evaluated on the Wisconsin diagnostic breast cancer dataset and the UCI heart disease dataset.

Experiments conducted on two datasets show that our AdaGBDT achieves the best performance, with the F1-value of 0.9647 and 0.8405 respectively. Moreover, a series of experimental analyses and case studies further illustrate the excellent performance of feature importance embedding.

The proposed case-specific explainable paramedical diagnosis via AdaGBDT has excellent predictive performance, with both promising case-level and consistent global explainability.