Hidden in Plain Sight: Subgroup Shifts Escape OOD Detection
Lisa M. Koch, Christian M. Schürch, Arthur Gretton, Philipp Berens
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The safe application of machine learning systems in healthcare relies on valid performance claims. Such claims are typically established in a clinical validation setting designed to be as close as possible to the intended use, but inadvertent domain or population shifts remain a fundamental problem. In particular, subgroups may be differently represented in the data distribution in the validation compared to the application setting. For example, algorithms trained on population cohort data spanning all age groups may be predominantly applied in elderly people. While these data are not ``out-of distribution'', changes in the prevalence of different subgroups may have considerable impact on algorithm performance or will at least render original performance claims invalid. Both are serious problems for safely deploying machine learning systems. In this paper, we demonstrate the fundamental limitations of individual example out-of-distribution detection for such scenarios, and show that subgroup shifts can be detected on a population-level instead. We formulate population-level shift detection in the framework of statistical hypothesis testing and show that recent state-of-the-art statistical tests can be effectively applied to subgroup shift detection in a synthetic scenario as well as real histopathology images.
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Friday 8th July
Poster Session 3.2 - onsite 11:00 - 12:00, virtual 15:20 - 16:20 (UTC+2)
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