Complication Risk Profiling in Diabetes Care: A Bayesian Multi-Task and Feature Relationship Learning Approach

Diabetes mellitus, commonly known as diabetes, is a chronic disease that often results in multiple complications. Risk prediction of diabetes complications is critical for healthcare professionals to design personalized treatment plans for patients in diabetes care for improved outcomes. In this paper, focusing on Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), we study the risk of developing complications after the initial T2DM diagnosis from longitudinal patient records. We propose a novel multi-task learning approach to simultaneously model multiple complications where each task corresponds to the risk modeling of one complication. Specifically, the proposed method strategically captures the relationships (1) between the risks of multiple T2DM complications, (2) between different risk factors, and (3) between the risk factor selection patterns, which assumes similar complications have similar contributing risk factors. The method uses coefficient shrinkage to identify an informative subset of risk factors from high-dimensional data, and uses a hierarchical Bayesian framework to allow domain knowledge to be incorporated as priors. The proposed method is favorable for healthcare applications because in addition to improved prediction performance, relationships among the different risks and among risk factors are also identified. Extensive experimental results on a large electronic medical claims database show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models by a significant margin. Furthermore, we show that the risk associations learned and the risk factors identified lead to meaningful clinical insights.