Feature Selection-driven Bias Deduction in Histopathology Images: Tackling Site-Specific Influences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of bias in deep neural models represents a significant reliability concern, which may lead to overoptimistic results on seen data while compromising the model's ability to generalize effectively on unseen datasets. Recent studies conducted on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which is a publicly available repository of histopathology images, reveal that the TCGA cancerous features extracted by deep neural networks surprisingly are able to discriminate slides based on their origin sites. This finding undoubtedly indicates the existence of site-specific patterns embedded in the extracted features learned by deep networks rather than focusing on histomorphologic patterns. Consequently, this biased behavior raises concerns about the reliability of these networks. This observation motivates us to conduct a series of experiments in which we present two distinct evolutionary feature selection strategies, each differentiated by its objective function evaluation. The primary goal is to select the features with a minimized foot-print of data source signatures, thereby ensuring a more accurate and site-independent cancer classification. We have conducted nine comprehensive independent experiments across nine cancer types, employing each evolutionary strategy. The comparison between results obtained through evolutionary strategies and the original feature sets highlights the substantial impact of feature selection methods on bias reduction while maintaining accuracy in cancer-type discrimination. Furthermore, the comparison of the two strategies with each other demonstrates the intricate nature of bias and its integration with cancerous features during the training process.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".