Ensembling Neural Networks for Improved Prediction and Privacy in Early Diagnosis of Sepsis
This work addresses the need for accurate and private machine learning models in medical diagnostics, particularly for sepsis prediction in intensive care units, with incremental contributions to existing ensembling techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of early sepsis prediction by ensembling patient-specific neural networks, achieving improved prediction accuracy and enabling privacy guarantees through differential privacy.
Ensembling neural networks is a long-standing technique for improving the generalization error of neural networks by combining networks with orthogonal properties via a committee decision. We show that this technique is an ideal fit for machine learning on medical data: First, ensembles are amenable to parallel and asynchronous learning, thus enabling efficient training of patient-specific component neural networks. Second, building on the idea of minimizing generalization error by selecting uncorrelated patient-specific networks, we show that one can build an ensemble of a few selected patient-specific models that outperforms a single model trained on much larger pooled datasets. Third, the non-iterative ensemble combination step is an optimal low-dimensional entry point to apply output perturbation to guarantee the privacy of the patient-specific networks. We exemplify our framework of differentially private ensembles on the task of early prediction of sepsis, using real-life intensive care unit data labeled by clinical experts.