A Calibrated Multi-Task Ensemble Architecture for Biomedical Risk Prediction

Computers, 2026

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.3390/computers15040244
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

Risk stratification of impaired glycemic control remains a major challenge in biomedical data analysis due to heterogeneous metabolic, behavioral, and therapeutic factors observed in large-scale populations. This study proposes a calibrated and interpretable decision–support framework, termed Calibrated Multi-Task Stacking Ensemble (CMSE), for joint modeling of clinically related glycemic outcomes. The framework integrates demographic variables, lipid profiles, renal and inflammatory biomarkers, dietary and smoking indicators, and therapy-related features within a unified predictive architecture. Robust modeling is ensured through leakage-aware preprocessing, quantile-based Winsorization, out-of-fold stacking, and isotonic calibration of probabilistic outputs. The physiological coherence between short-term and long-term glycemic markers is investigated using an explicit intertask coupling mechanism based on the estimated average glucose (eAG) ratio. Model interpretability is supported using SHAP analysis, mutual information, distance correlation, and feature importance metrics. In the primary medication-free screening configuration, the framework is evaluated on the NHANES 2017–March 2020 dataset, achieving ROC-AUC of 0.865 for diabetes classification and R2 values of 0.385 and 0.366 for plasma glucose and HbA1c prediction, respectively. These results indicate that CMSE provides a reliable and explainable approach for calibrated glycemic risk assessment and clinical decision support.