A Alejandro Montes Garcia

h-index3
2papers
23citations

2 Papers

4.9LGJul 16
A Transportable Threshold-Based Framework for Interpretable Classification of Medical Data

Antony Garcia, Adrian Noriega, Gabrielle Britton et al.

Black-box models limit the adoption of artificial intelligence in medicine due to their lack of interpretability and reproducibility. We introduce a statistically grounded framework that provides fully interpretable, rule-based clinical classification using the Bernoulli Naïve Bayes (BNB) model. The method applies supervised $χ^2$-guided statistical binarization to continuous variables, identifying thresholds that maximize association with clinical outcomes within the training data. This transformation allows BNB to operate effectively on continuous medical data without sacrificing its inherent transparency. The approach was evaluated on three benchmark datasets, Pima Indians Diabetes, Wisconsin Breast Cancer, and Heart Failure Prediction, achieving area-under-the-curve (AUC) scores of 0.800 for the Pima analysis, 0.984 for Wisconsin Breast Cancer, and 0.919 for Heart Failure Prediction. In addition to discrimination, probabilistic reliability was assessed using leakage-safe cross-validated calibration analysis including Brier score, calibration intercept/slope, and post-hoc beta calibration, which improved probability calibration across datasets. These results suggest that a statistically interpretable framework can achieve performance comparable to more complex models while providing explicit, clinically meaningful decision rules and calibrated risk estimates. To illustrate this transparency concretely, a complete worked example demonstrates that model inference can be reproduced using only a reference table and basic arithmetic, without access to software or proprietary tools. This work offers a practical approach to supporting trustworthy and generalizable AI in real-world healthcare settings.

23.7AIJun 25
The Capability Frontier: Benchmarks Miss 82% of Model Performance

Bradley Fowler, Ryan Smith, Daniel Thi Graviet et al.

Existing benchmarks typically report accuracy for a single model on a single run. This systematically understates real-world LLM capabilities, particularly under heterogeneous data distributions: (i) different models get different questions correct according to their specializations, and (ii) given a budget, multiple generations can be sampled and selectively retained. To quantify this gap, we introduce the Capability Frontier: a Pareto frontier over a set of models that characterizes the best achievable performance at each cost level under optimal selection across models and generations (i.e., via an oracle). Our construction corrects for two opposing biases: underestimation from single-model evaluation and overestimation from taking maxima over noisy samples. We study 21 LLMs across 16 widely used benchmarks spanning coding, reasoning, medicine, factuality, instruction following, and agentic tasks, comparing Capability Frontier performance at matched cost to each benchmark's top-performing model. Correcting for single-model evaluation yields a 54% error rate reduction; additionally correcting for single runs yields an 82% improvement, with SOTA accuracy matched at 85% cost reduction. Complementing these empirical results, we use controlled probabilistic simulations to show that higher query topic entropy produces a near-monotonic increase in the performance gap between oracle routing and the best single model. Our findings suggest collective LLM capabilities are substantially underestimated, with implications for evaluation and deployment in data-heterogeneous, multi-domain settings.