CohortNet: Empowering Cohort Discovery for Interpretable Healthcare Analytics
This addresses the need for interpretable, automated cohort studies in healthcare, which could reduce manual effort and improve analysis, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods with specific enhancements.
The paper tackles the problem of automating cohort discovery for healthcare analytics by proposing CohortNet, which identifies medically meaningful patient cohorts through fine-grained representations and heuristic exploration, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three real-world datasets.
Cohort studies are of significant importance in the field of healthcare analysis. However, existing methods typically involve manual, labor-intensive, and expert-driven pattern definitions or rely on simplistic clustering techniques that lack medical relevance. Automating cohort studies with interpretable patterns has great potential to facilitate healthcare analysis but remains an unmet need in prior research efforts. In this paper, we propose a cohort auto-discovery model, CohortNet, for interpretable healthcare analysis, focusing on the effective identification, representation, and exploitation of cohorts characterized by medically meaningful patterns. CohortNet initially learns fine-grained patient representations by separately processing each feature, considering both individual feature trends and feature interactions at each time step. Subsequently, it classifies each feature into distinct states and employs a heuristic cohort exploration strategy to effectively discover substantial cohorts with concrete patterns. For each identified cohort, it learns comprehensive cohort representations with credible evidence through associated patient retrieval. Ultimately, given a new patient, CohortNet can leverage relevant cohorts with distinguished importance, which can provide a more holistic understanding of the patient's conditions. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and offers interpretable insights from diverse perspectives in a top-down fashion.