Stronger Baseline Models -- A Key Requirement for Aligning Machine Learning Research with Clinical Utility

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of using stronger baseline models in healthcare machine learning research to better evaluate and deploy models effectively in clinical settings, addressing transparency and utility challenges.

Contribution

It demonstrates empirically that stronger baselines improve evaluation clarity and proposes best practices for clinical ML model assessment.

Findings

Weak baselines obscure ML model value

Stronger baselines clarify model improvements

Better evaluation practices aid clinical deployment

Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) research has increased substantially in recent years, due to the success of predictive modeling across diverse application domains. However, well-known barriers exist when attempting to deploy ML models in high-stakes, clinical settings, including lack of model transparency (or the inability to audit the inference process), large training data requirements with siloed data sources, and complicated metrics for measuring model utility. In this work, we show empirically that including stronger baseline models in healthcare ML evaluations has important downstream effects that aid practitioners in addressing these challenges. Through a series of case studies, we find that the common practice of omitting baselines or comparing against a weak baseline model (e.g. a linear model with no optimization) obscures the value of ML methods proposed in the research literature. Using these insights, we propose some best practices that will enable practitioners to more effectively study and deploy ML models in clinical settings.