Hiring in life sciences? Share your open positions with our professional community. Read more Close

Advertisement

Quantifying Epistemic Uncertainty in Predictions for Safer Health AI Performance Under Dataset Shifts.

Created on 03 Oct 2025

Authors

David Fernández-Narro, Pablo Ferri, Juan Miguel García-Gómez, Carlos Sáez

Published in

Studies in health technology and informatics. Volume 332. Pages 47-51. Oct 02, 2025.

Abstract

Out-of-distribution data , data coming from a different distribution with respect to the training data, entails a critical challenge for the robustness and safety of AI-based clinical decision support systems (CDSSs). This work aims to investigate whether real-time, sample-level quantification of epistemic uncertainty, the model's uncertainty due to limited knowledge of the true data-generating process, can act as a lightweight safety layer for health AI and CDSSs, targeting model updates and spotlighting human review. To this end, we trained and evaluated a continual learning-based neural network classifier on quarterly batches in a real-world Mexican COVID-19 dataset. For each training window, we estimated the distribution of the prediction epistemic uncertainties using Monte Carlo Dropout. We set a data-driven uncertainty threshold to determine potential out-of-distribution samples at 95% of that distribution. Results across all training-test time pairs show that samples below this threshold exhibit consistently higher macro-F1 and render performance virtually invariant to temporal drift, while the flagged samples captured most prediction errors. Since our method requires no model retraining, sample-level epistemic uncertainty screening offers a practical and efficient first line of defense for deploying health-AI systems in dynamic environments.

PMID:
41041744
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 03 Oct 2025.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Advertisement

Stats

  • Community rating n/a 0 votes
  • Reviewers' rating n/a 0 votes
  • Your rating

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

  • Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
  • Views 55
  • Comments 0

Recommended by

  • No recommendations yet.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Advertisement