MARIA: a Multimodal Transformer Model for Incomplete Healthcare Data
This addresses the challenge of incomplete data in healthcare diagnostics and prognostics, offering a more robust solution for real-world applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer and multimodal fusion techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of missing data in multimodal healthcare datasets by introducing MARIA, a transformer-based model that uses masked self-attention to process only available data without imputation, and it outperformed 10 state-of-the-art models across 8 tasks, showing improved performance and resilience to data incompleteness.
In healthcare, the integration of multimodal data is pivotal for developing comprehensive diagnostic and predictive models. However, managing missing data remains a significant challenge in real-world applications. We introduce MARIA (Multimodal Attention Resilient to Incomplete datA), a novel transformer-based deep learning model designed to address these challenges through an intermediate fusion strategy. Unlike conventional approaches that depend on imputation, MARIA utilizes a masked self-attention mechanism, which processes only the available data without generating synthetic values. This approach enables it to effectively handle incomplete datasets, enhancing robustness and minimizing biases introduced by imputation methods. We evaluated MARIA against 10 state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning models across 8 diagnostic and prognostic tasks. The results demonstrate that MARIA outperforms existing methods in terms of performance and resilience to varying levels of data incompleteness, underscoring its potential for critical healthcare applications.