SafeImpute: Reliable Clinical Data Imputation via Conformal Selection
For clinicians and healthcare AI systems, SafeImpute provides a principled way to use imputed values with statistical guarantees on error rates, enabling safer downstream decision-making.
SafeImpute addresses the problem of missing clinical data by selectively releasing only reliable imputations, controlling the false discovery rate of clinically unacceptable errors. On Mayo Clinic, MIMIC-III, and MIMIC-IV datasets, it achieves strong imputation accuracy while outperforming baselines in FDR-controlled selective-release evaluation.
Clinical care often relies on key laboratory indicators, yet real-world patient visits are sparse and tests are ordered irregularly, leading to pervasive missingness. While many imputation methods improve average accuracy, they provide limited guidance on which imputed values are reliable enough for high-stakes downstream use. In this work, we study reliable clinical imputation, aiming to produce accurate imputations while selectively releasing the reliable results, with statistical control over clinically unacceptable errors. To achieve this goal, we propose SafeImpute, a reliable imputation framework for irregular and sparse clinical longitudinal records. SafeImpute constructs an event graph that captures both intra-patient temporal trajectories and inter-patient clinical similarity, and learns imputations with a two-relation GNN and adaptive fusion, regularized by an auxiliary masked reconstruction objective. For reliability guarantees, SafeImpute converts a proxy risk score into conformal p-values and applies the Benjamini--Hochberg procedure to control the false discovery rate (FDR) of unacceptable errors among released imputations at a user-specified tolerance. Experiments on our Mayo Clinic data, the public MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets show that SafeImpute achieves strong imputation accuracy while providing reliable error control, outperforming diverse baselines in both standard imputation evaluation and FDR-controlled selective-release evaluation.