safety security
The Confidence Score Mistook Rarity for Ambiguity
Across 56 synthetic conditions and three neurodegenerative cohorts, standard uncertainty scores could systematically defer minority patients despite clear predictions.
Summary
Across 56 synthetic conditions and three neurodegenerative cohorts, standard uncertainty scores could systematically defer minority patients despite clear predictions.
Selective clinical systems are meant to pass ambiguous cases to people, but under severe class imbalance a global uncertainty score can become a proxy for the minority class itself. Across 56 synthetic settings and multiple-sclerosis, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's cohorts, the authors report that standard measures either collapsed minority sensitivity or protected it by over-deferring the majority. Their class-conditional risk framework with threshold-aware metrics maintained bounded, more balanced risk and restored within-class monotonicity. The findings concern the evaluated prognostic tasks and do not establish clinical safety without prospective validation.
Why it matters
Across 56 synthetic conditions and three neurodegenerative cohorts, standard uncertainty scores could systematically defer minority patients despite clear predictions.
Limits and context
- The findings concern the evaluated prognostic tasks and do not establish clinical safety without prospective validation.
Key claims
Across 56 synthetic conditions and three neurodegenerative cohorts, standard uncertainty scores could systematically defer minority patients despite clear predictions.
Qualification: The findings concern the evaluated prognostic tasks and do not establish clinical safety without prospective validation.
Evidence: source-2026-10-29-008
Sources
- arXiv preprint 2610.37561, original v1arXiv · primary research
Corrections
No corrections have been recorded for this story.