Certify, Report, or Refuse: Harm-Constrained Conformal Prediction for Clinical Actions
2611.12662

Authors

Zhiyuan Li,Lequan Yu

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.

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