Combining LSTM and Latent Topic Modeling for Mortality Prediction
This work addresses the need for accurate and interpretable mortality prediction in healthcare, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like LSTM and topic modeling.
The authors tackled mortality prediction in ICU patients by combining LSTM and latent topic modeling, achieving significant performance improvements over prior LDA-based models on the MIMIC-III dataset, though topic interpretability from neural network weights was limited.
There is a great need for technologies that can predict the mortality of patients in intensive care units with both high accuracy and accountability. We present joint end-to-end neural network architectures that combine long short-term memory (LSTM) and a latent topic model to simultaneously train a classifier for mortality prediction and learn latent topics indicative of mortality from textual clinical notes. For topic interpretability, the topic modeling layer has been carefully designed as a single-layer network with constraints inspired by LDA. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that our models significantly outperform prior models that are based on LDA topics in mortality prediction. However, we achieve limited success with our method for interpreting topics from the trained models by looking at the neural network weights.