arXiv News

First-hand information for everyone

Site

AboutPrivacy PolicyTerms of Use

© 2026 arXiv News

Cedar, a Large Language Model Pipeline, Outperforms Traditional Machine‑Learning Models in Predicting Diabetes Outcomes | arXiv News

arXiv News

EnglishJapanese

Switch language

EnglishJapanese
Loading account…

First-hand information for everyone

Back to front page
Quantitative BiologyEnglishPublished

Cedar, a Large Language Model Pipeline, Outperforms Traditional Machine‑Learning Models in Predicting Diabetes Outcomes

October 31, 2026arXiv: 2610.40379v1

Cedar (Clinical Evidence‑Driven Agent for Risk‑prediction) is a four‑stage pipeline that analyzes structured electronic health records, social‑determinants data from clinical notes, and, for type‑1 diabetes, continuous glucose monitoring traces. It publishes a probability of a future outcome, a table of cited evidence, and a written reasoning chain. In a retrospective study of 2,489 type‑2 and 4,018 type‑1 paediatric patients, Cedar achieved a pooled area‑under‑the‑receiver‑operator‑characteristic curve (ROC‑AUC) of 0.815 in type‑2 and 0.756 in type‑1 diabetes, surpassing classical machine‑learning models (0.700 and 0.631, respectively) and temporal models (0.656 and 0.603). For eleven cohort‑outcome pairs, Cedar ranked higher in nine cases, with confidence intervals that separated for dyslipidaemia in both cohorts. Only four of 70,246 evidence citations did not match the chart, and two pediatric endocrinologists reached Cedar’s predictions in nine of ten cases. The study was single‑center, retrospective, and the sample sizes were limited to the two cohorts, so generalisation to other settings or broader populations has not yet been established.

Figure summarizing Cedar's performance advantage over traditional models across eleven outcomes and two diabetes cohorts; differences and interval overlap are highlighted.
CohortOutcomeBest ML modelBest MLCedarDifferenceSeparated
T2DOptimal glycemic controlXGBoost-Temporal0.811 [0.764, 0.866]0.838 [0.790, 0.884]+0.026no
T2DInsulin independenceXGBoost-Temporal0.866 [0.815, 0.910]0.881 [0.833, 0.918]+0.014no
T2DMetformin responseLogistic regression0.779 [0.721, 0.831]0.842 [0.785, 0.883]+0.063no
T2DGLP-1RA responseRandom forest0.665 [0.556, 0.782]0.739 [0.652, 0.826]+0.074no
T2DDyslipidemiaRandom forest0.576 [0.499, 0.642]0.782 [0.731, 0.837]+0.206yes
T2DHypertensionRandom forest0.732 [0.632, 0.820]0.778 [0.656, 0.891]+0.045no
T2DMicroalbuminuriaXGBoost0.736 [0.651, 0.805]0.846 [0.778, 0.910]+0.110no
T1DOptimal glycemic controlRandom forest0.797 [0.738, 0.861]0.785 [0.701, 0.859]−0.012no
T1DDyslipidemiaXGBoost0.601 [0.511, 0.690]0.783 [0.706, 0.848]+0.182yes
T1DHypertensionLogistic regression0.688 [0.555, 0.811]0.666 [0.486, 0.826]−0.023no
T1DMicroalbuminuriaLSTM0.615 [0.509, 0.730]0.790 [0.677, 0.877]+0.175no
List of supptables 5. Comparison of Cedar’s ROC‑AUC to the best classical or temporal machine‑learning model for each cohort‑outcome pair. The table lists the best‑scoring baseline, the corresponding ROC‑AUC with 95 % bootstrap confidence interval, Cedar’s ROC‑AUC with interval, the difference, and whether the intervals are non‑overlapping. Cedar outperforms the baseline in nine of eleven cases, with separated intervals for dyslipidaemia in both T1D and T2D.Palacios, Daniel, Qi, Guantong, Kadi, Anna, Borrego, Natali, Aras, Sukru, Ferm, Michael L. et al. · arXiv:2610.40379v1 · List of supptables 5 · CC BY 4.0

The results are based on held‑out test sets derived from patients with valid input windows and non‑null labels, as shown in the table of assessable populations and outcome prevalences. Cedar’s performance advantage is reported under identical testing conditions for all models. The final evaluation used 2,000‑iteration patient‑level bootstrap confidence intervals and compared Cedar to the best‑performing classical or temporal model for each outcome.

Table listing, for each outcome and cohort (type 1 and type 2 diabetes), the count of patients with valid data and the prevalence percentage, illustrating the composition of the test sets.
OutcomeT1DT2D
Optimal glycemic control561 / 2544 (22.1%)512 / 1059 (48.3%)
Hypertension118 / 2531 (4.7%)102 / 1144 (8.9%)
Microalbuminuria58 / 280 (20.7%)217 / 849 (25.6%)
Dyslipidemia168 / 684 (24.6%)396 / 675 (58.7%)
Insulin independence—381 / 1038 (36.7%)
Metformin response—200 / 597 (33.5%)
GLP-1RA response—89 / 201 (44.3%)
List of supptables 1. Assessable population sizes and outcome prevalences used to construct the held‑out test sets. For each outcome the table shows the number of patients with a valid input window and a non‑null label (numerator) and the total assessable population (denominator).Palacios, Daniel, Qi, Guantong, Kadi, Anna, Borrego, Natali, Aras, Sukru, Ferm, Michael L. et al. · arXiv:2610.40379v1 · List of supptables 1 · CC BY 4.0

The advantage is uneven across outcomes; for example Cedar gained over 0.200 ROC‑AUC for dyslipidaemia in type‑2 diabetes and over 0.182 for dyslipidaemia in type‑1 diabetes, while in some cases the difference was only 0.01.

Source paper

Agentic LLM reasoning in pediatric diabetes outcome prediction from multimodal medical records

Quantitative BiologyNatural Language Processing
View on arXiv