Interpretable Machine Learning Classifiers for Brain Tumour Survival Prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prediction of survival in patients diagnosed with a brain tumour is challenging because of heterogeneous tumour behaviours and responses to treatment. Better estimations of prognosis would support treatment planning and patient support. Advances in machine learning have informed development of clinical predictive models, but their integration into clinical practice is almost non-existent. One reasons for this is the lack of interpretability of models. In this paper, we use a novel brain tumour dataset to compare two interpretable rule list models against popular machine learning approaches for brain tumour survival prediction. All models are quantitatively evaluated using standard performance metrics. The rule lists are also qualitatively assessed for their interpretability and clinical utility. The interpretability of the black box machine learning models is evaluated using two post-hoc explanation techniques, LIME and SHAP. Our results show that the rule lists were only slightly outperformed by the black box models. We demonstrate that rule list algorithms produced simple decision lists that align with clinical expertise. By comparison, post-hoc interpretability methods applied to black box models may produce unreliable explanations of local model predictions. Model interpretability is essential for understanding differences in predictive performance and for integration into clinical practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".