Shared Canonical Component Removal Beyond Expert Views

Jose Roberto Tello Ayala, Akl C. Fahed, Roy Perlis, Finale Doshi-Velez

In clinical practice, experts often begin by converting raw inputs into a set of expert features before making a decision. While black-box models trained on raw input can outperform models trained on expert views, it remains unclear what predictive signal the raw model exploits beyond what the expert view captures. We introduce an audit framework to quantify this gap using Shared Canonical Component Removal (SCCR). Unlike standard residualization or concept erasure, SCCR selectively removes only those directions strongly shared between learned raw and expert embeddings. Evaluations on synthetic data, coronary artery disease (CAD) detection, antidepressant treatment dropout prediction, and skin lesion classification using SkinCon annotations show that SCCR identifies the ways in which expert views are insufficient and recovers residual predictive signal while minimizing redundancy with the expert view.