Medical Heuristic Learning: An LLM-Driven Framework for Interpretable and Auditable Clinical Decision Rules
About
Predictive modeling for clinical decision support requires not only strong predictive performance but also transparent decision logic. Although deep learning and tree-based ensemble methods can achieve high accuracy, their black-box nature remains a major obstacle to clinical deployment. This challenge is further compounded by common characteristics of medical data, including limited sample sizes, severe class imbalance, and feature evolution arising from changes in diagnostic criteria and clinical documentation. To address these issues, we propose Medical Heuristic Learning (MHL), an instantiation of the learning beyond gradients paradigm for clinical prediction from structured medical data. Instead of relying on neural network weight updates, MHL uses a large language model (LLM) driven workflow that integrates statistical probes, medical knowledge probes, rule synthesis, and code-level iterative refinement to optimize a deterministic and executable rule-based expert system. The resulting model is expressed not as opaque parameters, but as versioned pure Python decision rules that are explicitly interpretable, fully auditable, and clinically grounded. MHL also supports continual learning by starting from previously validated rules and iteratively revising them using updated feature information under data drift or feature evolution. Comprehensive experiments on medical datasets show that MHL achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining strong behavior in small-sample and highly imbalanced settings. The results further indicate that this explicit rule-update mechanism can help alleviate catastrophic forgetting under feature evolution. Overall, these findings suggest that non-gradient-based heuristic systems offer a transparent and adaptable alternative for high-stakes clinical decision support.