Evaluating an information theoretic approach for selecting multimodal data fusion methods

Interest has grown in combining radiology, pathology, genomic, and clinical data to improve the accuracy of diagnostic and prognostic predictions toward precision health. However, most existing works choose their datasets and modeling approaches empirically and in an ad hoc manner. A prior study proposed four partial information decomposition (PID)-based metrics to provide a theoretical understanding of multimodal data interactions: redundancy, uniqueness of each modality, and synergy. However, these metrics have only been evaluated in a limited collection of biomedical data, and the existing work does not elucidate the effect of parameter selection when calculating the PID metrics. In this work, we evaluate PID metrics on a wider range of biomedical data, including clinical, radiology, pathology, and genomic data, and propose potential improvements to the PID metrics.

We apply the PID metrics to seven different modality pairs across four distinct cohorts (datasets). We compare and interpret trends in the resulting PID metrics and downstream model performance in these multimodal cohorts. The downstream tasks being evaluated include predicting the prognosis (either overall survival or recurrence) of patients with non-small cell lung cancer, prostate cancer, and glioblastoma.

We found that, while PID metrics are informative, solely relying on these metrics to decide on a fusion approach does not always yield a machine learning model with optimal performance. Of the seven different modality pairs, three had poor (0%), three had moderate (66%-89%), and only one had perfect (100%) consistency between the PID values and model performance. We propose two improvements to the PID metrics (determining the optimal parameters and uncertainty estimation) and identified areas where PID metrics could be further improved.

The current PID metrics are not accurate enough for estimating the multimodal data interactions and need to be improved before they can serve as a reliable tool. We propose improvements and provide suggestions for future work. Code: https://github.com/zhtyolivia/pid-multimodal.