Cited by 313Acute Kidney Injury ResearchMachine Learning in HealthcareArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Calibration drift in regression and machine learning models for acute kidney injury

Open access
Davis, Sharon E, Lasko, Thomas A, Chen, Guanhua, Siew, Edward D, Matheny, Michael E·2017·Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

Abstract

Objective: Predictive analytics create opportunities to incorporate personalized risk estimates into clinical decision support. Models must be well calibrated to support decision-making, yet calibration deteriorates over time. This study explored the influence of modeling methods on performance drift and connected observed drift with data shifts in the patient population. Materials and Methods: Using 2003 admissions to Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals nationwide, we developed 7 parallel models for hospital-acquired acute kidney injury using common regression and machine learning methods, validating each over 9 subsequent years. Results: Discrimination was maintained for all models. Calibration declined as all models increasingly overpredicted risk. However, the random forest and neural network models maintained calibration across ranges of probability, capturing more admissions than did the regression models. The magnitude of overprediction increased over time for the regression models while remaining stable and small for the machine learning models. Changes in the rate of acute kidney injury were strongly linked to increasing overprediction, while changes in predictor-outcome associations corresponded with diverging patterns of calibration drift across methods. Conclusions: Efficient and effective updating protocols will be essential for maintaining accuracy of, user confidence in, and safety of personalized risk predictions to support decision-making. Model updating protocols should be tailored to account for variations in calibration drift across methods and respond to periods of rapid performance drift rather than be limited to regularly scheduled annual or biannual intervals.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/jamia/ocx030

Cites

72 of 72 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Ongoing monitoring is essential because the performance and effect(s) of AI models can change after deployment.

    “Ongoing monitoring is essential because the performance and effect(s) of AI models can change after deployment 27,28 .”

    From Standing on FURM Ground: A Framework for Evaluating Fair, Useful, and Reliable AI Models in Health Care Systems (2024) · cites this paper as [27]

    The Discussion (2012 – Q4) recommends repeated validation and monitoring because model calibration can drift over time. It does not establish that the effects of deployed AI models change; the limitations section says the effect of calibration drift on clinical utility remains uncertain. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Proprietary models are difficult to assess owing to their opaque nature and have been shown to decline in performance over time.

    “This limited information is of concern because proprietary models are difficult to assess owing to their opaque nature and have been shown to decline in performance over time.15,16”

    From External validation of a widely implemented proprietary sepsis prediction model in hospitalized patients (2021) · cites this paper as [16]

    The Results (passages [1] and [2]) report that calibration deteriorated over nine years in the study’s AKI prediction models, supporting the performance-over-time part of the claim. The paper does not establish that proprietary models are difficult to assess because they are opaque; it also reports that discrimination was largely maintained. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Calibration failure is structural and progressive rather than sporadic.

    “This extends prior reports of temporal miscalibration [32–34] by showing calibration failure is structural and progressive rather than sporadic.”

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Davis, S. E., Lasko, T. A., Chen, G., Siew, E. D., & Matheny, M. E.
Affiliations
Vanderbilt University (US)
Corresponding author
Matheny, Michael E
Venue
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
Published
2017-03-31
Volume
24
Issue
6
Pages
1052-1061
ISSN
  • 1067-5027 (ISSN-L)
  • 1527-974X
OpenAlex
W2604834158
Cited by
312
References
72
Citations by year
2026: 58 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 39 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 45 · 2021: 41 · 2020: 29 · 2019: 20 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 3
FWCI
15.17
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Library of Medicine (5T15LM007450-15, 1R21LM011664-01)
  • Veterans Health Administration (VA HSR&D CDA-08-020, VA HSR&D IIR 11-292, VA HSR&D IIR 13-052, VA HSR&D IIR 13-073)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Nephrology › Acute Kidney Injury Research
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Health Information Management › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Keywords
acute kidney injury, performance drift, hospital-acquired acute kidney injury, risk prediction, random forest, artificial neural networks, regression models, clinical decision support, veterans, distribution shift
MeSH terms
Clinical Decision-Making, Machine Learning, Aged, Bayes Theorem, Decision Support Techniques, Female, Hospitals, Veterans, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, United States, Logistic Models, Acute Kidney Injury

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review