Novel Disease Detection Using Ensembles with Regularized Disagreement

Alexandru Tifrea, Eric Stavarache, Fanny Yang

Abstract: Automated medical diagnosis systems need to be able to recognize when new diseases emerge, that are not represented in the training data (ID). Even though current out-of-distribution (OOD) detection algorithms can successfully distinguish completely different data sets, they fail to reliably identify samples from novel classes that are similar to the training data. We develop a new ensemble-based procedure that promotes model diversity and exploits regularization to limit disagreement to only OOD samples, using a batch containing an unknown mixture of ID and OOD data. We show that our procedure significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including those that have access, during training, to known OOD data. We run extensive comparisons of our approach on a variety of novel-class detection scenarios, on standard image data sets as well as on new disease detection on medical image data sets (Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ericpts/reto ).