Multivariate and Online Transfer Learning With Uncertainty Quantification

Untreated periodontitis causes inflammation within the supporting tissue of the teeth and can ultimately lead to tooth loss. Modeling periodontal outcomes is beneficial as they are difficult and time-consuming to measure, but disparities in representation between demographic groups must be considered. There may not be enough participants to build group-specific models, and it can be ineffective, and even dangerous, to apply a model to participants in an underrepresented group if demographic differences were not considered during training. We propose an extension to the RECaST Bayesian transfer learning framework. Our method jointly models multivariate outcomes, exhibiting significant improvement over the previous univariate RECaST method. Further, we introduce an online approach to model sequential data sets. Negative transfer is mitigated to ensure that the information shared from the other demographic groups does not negatively impact the modeling of the underrepresented participants. The Bayesian framework naturally provides uncertainty quantification on predictions. Especially important in medical applications, our method does not share data between domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both predictive performance and uncertainty quantification on simulated data and on a database of dental records from the HealthPartners Institute.