David Selby

Yousef Koka, David Selby, Gerrit Großmann et al.

Data preprocessing is a critical yet frequently neglected aspect of machine learning, often paid little attention despite its potentially significant impact on model performance. While automated machine learning pipelines are starting to recognize and integrate data preprocessing into their solutions for classification and regression tasks, this integration is lacking for more specialized tasks like survival or time-to-event models. As a result, survival analysis not only faces the general challenges of data preprocessing but also suffers from the lack of tailored, automated solutions in this area. To address this gap, this paper presents 'CleanSurvival', a reinforcement-learning-based solution for optimizing preprocessing pipelines, extended specifically for survival analysis. The framework can handle continuous and categorical variables, using Q-learning to select which combination of data imputation, outlier detection and feature extraction techniques achieves optimal performance for a Cox, random forest, neural network or user-supplied time-to-event model. The package is available on GitHub: https://github.com/datasciapps/CleanSurvival Experimental benchmarks on real-world datasets show that the Q-learning-based data preprocessing results in superior predictive performance to standard approaches, finding such a model up to 10 times faster than undirected random grid search. Furthermore, a simulation study demonstrates the effectiveness in different types and levels of missingness and noise in the data.

David Selby, Kai Spriestersbach, Yuichiro Iwashita et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively studied for their abilities to generate convincing natural language sequences, however their utility for quantitative information retrieval is less well understood. Here we explore the feasibility of LLMs as a mechanism for quantitative knowledge retrieval to aid two data analysis tasks: elicitation of prior distributions for Bayesian models and imputation of missing data. We introduce a framework that leverages LLMs to enhance Bayesian workflows by eliciting expert-like prior knowledge and imputing missing data. Tested on diverse datasets, this approach can improve predictive accuracy and reduce data requirements, offering significant potential in healthcare, environmental science and engineering applications. We discuss the implications and challenges of treating LLMs as 'experts'.

Shota Arai, David Selby, Andrew Vargo et al.

Imagine a world where clinical trials need far fewer patients to achieve the same statistical power, thanks to the knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs). We present a novel framework for hierarchical Bayesian modeling of adverse events in multi-center clinical trials, leveraging LLM-informed prior distributions. Unlike data augmentation approaches that generate synthetic data points, our methodology directly obtains parametric priors from the model. Our approach systematically elicits informative priors for hyperparameters in hierarchical Bayesian models using a pre-trained LLM, enabling the incorporation of external clinical expertise directly into Bayesian safety modeling. Through comprehensive temperature sensitivity analysis and rigorous cross-validation on real-world clinical trial data, we demonstrate that LLM-derived priors consistently improve predictive performance compared to traditional meta-analytical approaches. This methodology paves the way for more efficient and expert-informed clinical trial design, enabling substantial reductions in the number of patients required to achieve robust safety assessment and with the potential to transform drug safety monitoring and regulatory decision making.

Rahul Sharma, Sergey Redyuk, Sumantrak Mukherjee et al.

Explainable AI (XAI) and interpretable machine learning methods help to build trust in model predictions and derived insights, yet also present a perverse incentive for analysts to manipulate XAI metrics to support pre-specified conclusions. This paper introduces the concept of X-hacking, a form of p-hacking applied to XAI metrics such as SHAP values. We show how easily an automated machine learning pipeline can be adapted to exploit model multiplicity at scale: searching a Rashomon set of 'defensible' models with similar predictive performance to find a desired explanation. We formulate the trade-off between explanation and accuracy as a multi-objective optimisation problem, and illustrate empirically on familiar real-world datasets that, on average, Bayesian optimisation accelerates X-hacking 3-fold for features susceptible to it, versus random sampling. We show the vulnerability of a dataset to X-hacking can be determined by information redundancy among features. Finally, we suggest possible methods for detection and prevention, and discuss ethical implications for the credibility and reproducibility of XAI.