CardioMeta: Calibrated Multi-Task Prediction of Diabetes, Hypertension, and Cardiovascular Disease Across Population and EHR Data

S M Asif Hossain, Ruksat Khan Shayoni, M. F. Mridha, Jungpil Shin

Cardiometabolic diseases remain among the most persistent drivers of preventable morbidity because diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease frequently co-occur and share metabolic, vascular, demographic, and behavioral determinants. Existing machine learning studies for chronic disease prediction often emphasize discrimination on a single dataset, while underreporting label leakage, calibration, temporal robustness, external transportability, and subgroup reliability. This paper presents CardioMeta, a calibrated multi-task framework for joint prediction of diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease across population survey and electronic health record (EHR) data. The study uses NHANES for population-level model development and temporal validation, and MIMIC-IV for EHR-domain evaluation under substantial distribution shift. To reduce circular label reconstruction, the primary analysis excludes disease-defining variables from the corresponding prediction heads, while a full-clinical feature setting is retained only as sensitivity analysis. CardioMeta combines a shared cardiometabolic encoder with disease-specific gated heads and post-hoc probability calibration. In the leakage-reduced temporal validation setting, the model achieved a macro-AUROC of 0.839, macro-AUPRC of 0.536, macro-F1 of 0.614, and expected calibration error of 0.024, with modest but consistent improvements over strong gradient-boosting and neural tabular baselines. External evaluation on MIMIC-IV showed clear degradation under domain shift, while limited fine-tuning partially recovered performance. The findings indicate that the principal value of multi-task cardiometabolic modeling lies not in inflated accuracy, but in reproducible leakage control, calibrated probabilities, and transparent reliability reporting across heterogeneous healthcare data sources.