Categorical EHR Imputation with Generative Adversarial Nets
This work addresses a critical issue in clinical practice and studies by enhancing data imputation for EHRs, though it is incremental as it builds on prior GAN-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of missing categorical data in Electronic Health Records by proposing a GAN-based imputation method that recodes categorical features to stabilize training, resulting in improved prediction accuracy compared to traditional approaches.
Electronic Health Records often suffer from missing data, which poses a major problem in clinical practice and clinical studies. A novel approach for dealing with missing data are Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs), which have been generating huge research interest in image generation and transformation. Recently, researchers have attempted to apply GANs to missing data generation and imputation for EHR data: a major challenge here is the categorical nature of the data. State-of-the-art solutions to the GAN-based generation of categorical data involve either reinforcement learning, or learning a bidirectional mapping between the categorical and the real latent feature space, so that the GANs only need to generate real-valued features. However, these methods are designed to generate complete feature vectors instead of imputing only the subsets of missing features. In this paper we propose a simple and yet effective approach that is based on previous work on GANs for data imputation. We first motivate our solution by discussing the reason why adversarial training often fails in case of categorical features. Then we derive a novel way to re-code the categorical features to stabilize the adversarial training. Based on experiments on two real-world EHR data with multiple settings, we show that our imputation approach largely improves the prediction accuracy, compared to more traditional data imputation approaches.