Transfer Learning with Informative Priors: Simple Baselines Better than Previously Reported

We pursue transfer learning to improve classifier accuracy on a target task with few labeled examples available for training. Recent work suggests that using a source task to learn a prior distribution over neural net weights, not just an initialization, can boost target task performance. In this study, we carefully compare transfer learning with and without source task informed priors across 5 datasets. We find that standard transfer learning informed by an initialization only performs far better than reported in previous comparisons. The relative gains of methods using informative priors over standard transfer learning vary in magnitude across datasets. For the scenario of 5-300 examples per class, we find negative or negligible gains on 2 datasets, modest gains (between 1.5-3 points of accuracy) on 2 other datasets, and substantial gains (>8 points) on one dataset. Among methods using informative priors, we find that an isotropic covariance appears competitive with learned low-rank covariance matrix while being substantially simpler to understand and tune. Further analysis suggests that the mechanistic justification for informed priors -- hypothesized improved alignment between train and test loss landscapes -- is not consistently supported due to high variability in empirical landscapes. We release code to allow independent reproduction of all experiments.

A Probabilistic Method to Predict Classifier Accuracy on Larger Datasets given Small Pilot Data

Practitioners building classifiers often start with a smaller pilot dataset and plan to grow to larger data in the near future. Such projects need a toolkit for extrapolating how much classifier accuracy may improve from a 2x, 10x, or 50x increase in data size. While existing work has focused on finding a single "best-fit" curve using various functional forms like power laws, we argue that modeling and assessing the uncertainty of predictions is critical yet has seen less attention. In this paper, we propose a Gaussian process model to obtain probabilistic extrapolations of accuracy or similar performance metrics as dataset size increases. We evaluate our approach in terms of error, likelihood, and coverage across six datasets. Though we focus on medical tasks and image modalities, our open source approach generalizes to any kind of classifier.

A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models for Early Detection of Hospital-Acquired Infections

As more and more infection-specific machine learning models are developed and planned for clinical deployment, simultaneously running predictions from different models may provide overlapping or even conflicting information. It is important to understand the concordance and behavior of parallel models in deployment. In this study, we focus on two models for the early detection of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs): 1) the Infection Risk Index (IRI) and 2) the Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia (VAP) prediction model. The IRI model was built to predict all HAIs, whereas the VAP model identifies patients at risk of developing ventilator-associated pneumonia. These models could make important improvements in patient outcomes and hospital management of infections through early detection of infections and in turn, enable early interventions. The two models vary in terms of infection label definition, cohort selection, and prediction schema. In this work, we present a comparative analysis between the two models to characterize concordances and confusions in predicting HAIs by these models. The learnings from this study will provide important findings for how to deploy multiple concurrent disease-specific models in the future.