Cumulative Stay-time Representation for Electronic Health Records in Medical Event Time Prediction
This addresses the problem of predicting disease onset for patients with non-communicable diseases like diabetes, offering an incremental improvement in EHR analysis.
The paper tackles predicting medical event times from electronic health records by proposing a cumulative stay-time representation that directly models cumulative health conditions, achieving high prediction performance and enhancing existing models in experiments.
We address the problem of predicting when a disease will develop, i.e., medical event time (MET), from a patient's electronic health record (EHR). The MET of non-communicable diseases like diabetes is highly correlated to cumulative health conditions, more specifically, how much time the patient spent with specific health conditions in the past. The common time-series representation is indirect in extracting such information from EHR because it focuses on detailed dependencies between values in successive observations, not cumulative information. We propose a novel data representation for EHR called cumulative stay-time representation (CTR), which directly models such cumulative health conditions. We derive a trainable construction of CTR based on neural networks that has the flexibility to fit the target data and scalability to handle high-dimensional EHR. Numerical experiments using synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that CTR alone achieves a high prediction performance, and it enhances the performance of existing models when combined with them.