title: Motivating the additional use of external validity: examining transportability in a model of glioblastoma multiforme.
abstract: Despite the growing ubiquity of data in the medical domain, it remains difficult to apply results from experimental and observational studies to additional populations suffering from the same disease. Many methods are employed for testing internal validity; yet limited effort is made in testing generalizability, or external validity. The development of disease models often suffers from this lack of validity testing and trained models frequently have worse performance on different populations, rendering them ineffective. In this work, we discuss the use of transportability theory, a causal graphical model examination, as a mechanism for determining what elements of a data resource can be shared or moved between a source and target population. A simplified Bayesian model of glioblastoma multiforme serves as the example for discussion and preliminary analysis. Examination over data collection hospitals from the TCGA dataset demonstrated improvement of prediction in a transported model over a baseline model.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles ; Medical Imaging Informatics, Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles.
authors.forename: Kyle W
authors.initials: KW
authors.lastname: Singleton
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles ; Medical Imaging Informatics, Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Speier
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles ; Medical Imaging Informatics, Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles.
authors.forename: Alex A T
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Bui
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles ; Medical Imaging Informatics, Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Hsu
mesh_terms: D001499:Bayes Theorem; D005909:Glioblastoma; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D011379:Prognosis; D054928:Validation Studies as Topic