Interpretable Models Capable of Handling Systematic Missingness in Imbalanced Classes and Heterogeneous Datasets
Application of interpretable machine learning techniques on medical datasets
facilitate early and fast diagnoses, along with getting deeper insight into the
data. Furthermore, the transparency of these models increase trust among
application domain experts. Medical datasets face common issues such as
heterogeneous measurements, imbalanced classes with limited sample size, and
missing data, which hinder the straightforward application of machine learning
techniques. In this paper we present a family of prototype-based (PB)
interpretable models which are capable of handling these issues. The models
introduced in this contribution show comparable or superior performance to
alternative techniques applicable in such situations. However, unlike ensemble
based models, which have to compromise on easy interpretation, the PB models
here do not. Moreover we propose a strategy of harnessing the power of
ensembles while maintaining the intrinsic interpretability of the PB models, by
averaging the model parameter manifolds. All the models were evaluated on a
synthetic (publicly available dataset) in addition to detailed analyses of two
real-world medical datasets (one publicly available). Results indicated that
the models and strategies we introduced addressed the challenges of real-world
medical data, while remaining computationally inexpensive and transparent, as
well as similar or superior in performance compared to their alternatives.