Eliciting associations between clinical variables from LLMs via comparison questions across populations

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to extract meaningful correlation and causal information from large language models in biomedical contexts using structured comparison questions and statistical modeling, enabling invariant causal predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining triplet comparison questions with statistical models to infer correlations and causal links from LLMs without internal access.

Findings

Correlations elicited are smooth, stable, and clinically interpretable.

Method supports invariant causal prediction with a small set of candidate links.

Approach demonstrated in COPD and MS clinical domains.

Abstract

The training data of large language models (LLMs) comprises a wide range of biomedical literature, reflecting data from many different patient populations. We investigate how it might be possible to recover information on correlation and causal links between patient characteristics, as a key building block for medical decision making. To avoid the pitfalls of direct elicitation, we propose an approach based on structured comparison questions, specifically patient comparison triplet questions. This is combined with a statistical model for the LLM representation that provides estimates of correlations without access to activations or model internals. Intuitively, we consider how similarity decisions of LLMs based on a first variable are affected by providing information on a second variable for one of the patients being assessed. We then induce prompt-level environment shifts to obtain correlation estimates for different subpopulations, which enables an invariant causal prediction (ICP) approach to obtain conservative candidate parent links. We demonstrate the method in two clinical domains, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and multiple sclerosis (MS). Across prompted environments, the elicited correlations are smooth, stable, and clinically interpretable, yet vary in a statistically significant way that supports downstream invariance testing, such that ICP provides a small set of candidate invariant parent links. These results show that indirect elicitation via triplet comparisons can recover meaningful association structure from LLMs and offer a cautious route from implicit correlations to causal statements that are congruent with LLM answering patterns.