Tab-semiSL: Tabular Data-Driven Semi-Supervised Learning to Identify Factors Associated with Immune-Related Adverse Events

Abstract

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (ICIs) have become a major therapeutic strategy in cancer treatment. However, widespread ICIs use can cause mild-to-severe immune-related Adverse Events (irAEs). Identifying factors associated with irAEs is beneficial for assessing the risk of irAEs occurrence during ICIs treatment. Nevertheless, the lack of sufficient irAEs-related clinical tabular data has slowed progress in this field. Thus, we proposed Tabular data-driven semi-Supervised Learning (Tab-semiSL), a novel Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) method specifically designed for tabular data. Tab-semiSL can be divided into the pre-training phase and SSL phase. Specifically, in the pre-training, we used the collected dataset of 4,817 cancer patients without the irAEs label to train an auto-encoder. In the SSL phase, the predictor was fine-tuned using the collected dataset of 237 irAEs labeled cancer patients who treated with ICIs. We assigned class-specific thresholds and used samples as pseudo-labels only when their maximum confidence exceeded the threshold, with the thresholds dynamically adjusted during training to improve reliability. We tested Tab-semiSL against three traditional machine learning approaches and five semi-supervised or self-supervised methods using two public datasets plus the collected clinical data, achieving outperformed results across most metrics. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis revealed ten key factors linked to irAEs. Code and Supplementary Material are available at https://github.com/RuhaoLiu/Tab-semiSL