Systematic Review of Approaches to Preserve Machine Learning Performance in the Presence of Temporal Dataset Shift in Clinical Medicine
Open accessAbstract
Objective The change in performance of machine learning models over time as a result of temporal dataset shift is a barrier to machine learning-derived models facilitating decision-making in clinical practice. Our aim was to describe technical procedures used to preserve the performance of machine learning models in the presence of temporal dataset shifts. Methods Studies were included if they were fully published articles that used machine learning and implemented a procedure to mitigate the effects of temporal dataset shift in a clinical setting. We described how dataset shift was measured, the procedures used to preserve model performance, and their effects. Results Of 4,457 potentially relevant publications identified, 15 were included. The impact of temporal dataset shift was primarily quantified using changes, usually deterioration, in calibration or discrimination. Calibration deterioration was more common (n = 11) than discrimination deterioration (n = 3). Mitigation strategies were categorized as model level or feature level. Model-level approaches (n = 15) were more common than feature-level approaches (n = 2), with the most common approaches being model refitting (n = 12), probability calibration (n = 7), model updating (n = 6), and model selection (n = 6). In general, all mitigation strategies were successful at preserving calibration but not uniformly successful in preserving discrimination. Conclusion There was limited research in preserving the performance of machine learning models in the presence of temporal dataset shift in clinical medicine. Future research could focus on the impact of dataset shift on clinical decision making, benchmark the mitigation strategies on a wider range of datasets and tasks, and identify optimal strategies for specific settings.
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Influential
- Authors
- Guo, L. L., Pfohl, S. R., Fries, J., Posada, J., Fleming, S. L., Aftandilian, C., Shah, N., & Sung, L.
- Affiliations
- Hospital for Sick Children (CA)
- Stanford University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Sung, Lillian
- ORCID
- Venue
- Applied Clinical Informatics
- Publisher
- Georg Thieme Verlag KG
- Published
- 2021-08
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 04
- Pages
- 808-815
- ISSN
- 1869-0327 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8410238
- OpenAlex
- W3196529262
- Cited by
- 96
- References
- 34
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 29 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 12
- FWCI
- 0.69
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Applied Clinical Informatics (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
- Keywords
- concept drift, clinical decision support, probability calibration, model updating, model selection
- MeSH terms
- Clinical Decision-Making, Machine Learning, Cognition, Clinical Medicine
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