A Bayesian Feature Weighting Model with Simplex-Constrained Dirichlet and Contamination-Aware Priors for Noisy Medical Data

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Abstract
Feature weighting plays a central role in medical classification by enhancing predictive accuracy, interpretability, and clinical trust through the explicit quantification of variable relevance. Despite their widespread use, existing filter-, wrapper-, and embedded-based feature weighting methods are predominantly deterministic and exhibit pronounced sensitivity to label noise and outliers, which are pervasive in real-world medical data. This often results in unstable importance estimates and unreliable clinical interpretations. In this work, we introduce a novel Bayesian feature weighting model that fundamentally departs from existing approaches by jointly integrating simplex-constrained Dirichlet priors for global feature weights, hierarchical shrinkage priors for coefficient regularization, and contamination-aware priors for explicit modeling of label noise within a single coherent probabilistic framework. Unlike conventional Bayesian feature selection or robust classification models, the proposed formulation yields globally interpretable feature weights defined on the probability simplex, while simultaneously providing full posterior uncertainty quantification and robustness to both mislabeled observations and aberrant feature values through principled influence control. Comprehensive simulation studies across diverse contamination scenarios, together with applications to multiple real-world medical datasets, demonstrate that the proposed model consistently outperforms classical and state-of-the-art baselines in terms of discrimination, probabilistic calibration, and stability of feature-importance estimates. These results highlight the practical and methodological significance of the proposed framework as a robust, uncertainty-aware, and interpretable solution for medical decision making under noisy data conditions.
Funding Information
  • Deanship of Scientific Research at Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMSIU-DDRSP2601)

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