Equity-Regularized Federated Multimodal Learning with Missingness-Aware Gating and Subgroup- Conditional Conformal Risk Control for Clinical Prediction

Equity-Regularized Federated Multimodal Learning with Missingness-Aware Gating and Subgroup-Conditional Conformal Risk Control for Clinical Prediction presents PRISM-Fed, a privacy-preserving federated learning framework designed to improve the fairness, robustness, and reliability of clinical prediction across heterogeneous healthcare institutions. The framework integrates a Missingness-Aware Gating (MAG) mechanism to effectively handle incomplete multimodal clinical data without requiring imputation, an Equity-Regularized Federated Aggregation (EqFedAvg) strategy that prioritizes underperforming patient subgroups during model optimization, and Subgroup-Conditional Conformal Risk Control (SC-CRC) to provide distribution-free, subgroup-specific risk guarantees with calibrated clinical decision thresholds. By jointly addressing missing modalities, demographic disparities, and uncertainty calibration within a federated environment, PRISM-Fed enables trustworthy, equitable, and privacy-preserving clinical prediction while maintaining high predictive performance and robustness under real-world deployment conditions.