The Pitfalls of Sample Selection: A Case Study on Lung Nodule Classification

TL;DR

This paper highlights how different data selection processes in lung nodule classification studies lead to inconsistent results, emphasizing the importance of standardized data practices for fair comparison and valid conclusions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of data selection and label aggregation choices on model performance and highlights the need for standardized methodologies in lung nodule classification research.

Findings

Different data selection processes cause significant performance variation.

Specific label aggregation choices can alter data distribution and results.

Advanced models may underperform simple baselines on challenging data subsets.

Abstract

Using publicly available data to determine the performance of methodological contributions is important as it facilitates reproducibility and allows scrutiny of the published results. In lung nodule classification, for example, many works report results on the publicly available LIDC dataset. In theory, this should allow a direct comparison of the performance of proposed methods and assess the impact of individual contributions. When analyzing seven recent works, however, we find that each employs a different data selection process, leading to largely varying total number of samples and ratios between benign and malignant cases. As each subset will have different characteristics with varying difficulty for classification, a direct comparison between the proposed methods is thus not always possible, nor fair. We study the particular effect of truthing when aggregating labels from multiple experts. We show that specific choices can have severe impact on the data distribution where it may be possible to achieve superior performance on one sample distribution but not on another. While we show that we can further improve on the state-of-the-art on one sample selection, we also find that on a more challenging sample selection, on the same database, the more advanced models underperform with respect to very simple baseline methods, highlighting that the selected data distribution may play an even more important role than the model architecture. This raises concerns about the validity of claimed methodological contributions. We believe the community should be aware of these pitfalls and make recommendations on how these can be avoided in future work.