Structure-aware Hypergraph Transformer for Diagnosis Prediction in Electronic Health Records
This work addresses the challenge of capturing complex clinical interactions in EHR data for improved diagnosis prediction, representing an incremental advancement over prior graph-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling higher-order dependencies in Electronic Health Records for diagnosis prediction by proposing a Structure-aware HyperGraph Transformer, which outperformed existing state-of-the-art models on real-world datasets.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) systematically organize patient health data through standardized medical codes, serving as a comprehensive and invaluable source for predictive modeling. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated effectiveness in modeling interactions between medical codes within EHR. However, existing GNN-based methods are inadequate due to: a) their reliance on pairwise relations fails to capture the inherent higher-order dependencies in clinical data, and b) the localized message-passing scheme limits representation power. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Structure-aware HyperGraph Transformer (SHGT) framework following three-fold ideas: a) employing a hypergraph structural encoder to capture higher-order interactions among medical codes, b) integrating the Transformer architecture to reason over the entire hypergraph, and c) designing a tailored loss function incorporating hypergraph reconstruction to preserve the hypergraph's original structure. Experiments on real-world EHR datasets demonstrate that the proposed SHGT outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on diagnosis prediction.