Abstract
Routing a melanoma case to routine follow-up is a serious action error that diagnostic coverage alone does not rule out. We present Harm-Constrained Risk-Optimal Conformal Prediction (HC-ROCP), a training-free framework that uses frozen classifier probabilities and adds a harm penalty when choosing prediction sets and actions.
We test the resulting policies on disjoint calibration splits with multiplicity adjustment. HC-ROCP certifies supported claims, reports descriptive fallback policies, and refuses unsupported subgroup claims.
We evaluate these outputs retrospectively on COVID-19 radiographs, ISIC 2019 dermoscopy, and EyePACS-to-APTOS retinopathy transfer. Across ten calibration seeds, HC-ROCP reduces COVID-19 severe-action errors from the exact risk-optimal baseline's 4.68% to 0.54%.
At a 5% budget, global claims are certified for COVID-19 and ISIC, but the rare squamous-cell-carcinoma claim is refused. At 1%, all settings receive descriptive reports.
For each budget, we also report the minimum severe-case count needed to pass the global harm gate with zero errors, providing a starting point for further data collection.