Towards Interpretability and Personalization: A Predictive Framework for Clinical Time-series Analysis

Clinical time-series is receiving long-term attention in data mining and machine learning communities and has boosted a variety of data-driven applications. Identifying similar patients or subgroups from clinical time-series is an essential step to design tailored treatments in clinical practice. However, most of the existing methods are either purely unsupervised that tend to neglect the patient outcome information or cannot generate personalized patient representation through supervised learning, thus may fail to identify ‘truly similar patients’ (i.e., patients who similar in both outcomes and individual outcome-related clinical variables). To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel predictive clinical time-series analysis framework. Specifically, our framework uses task-specific information to rule out the task-irrelevant factors in each patient data individually and generates the contribution scores that reveal the factors’ importance for the patient outcome. Then a patient representation construction method is proposed to generate task-related and personalized representations by combining remained factors and their contribution scores. At last, similarity measurement or cluster analysis can be conducted. We evaluate our framework on three real-world clinical time-series datasets, empirically demonstrate that our framework achieves improvements in prediction performance, similarity measurement, and clustering, thus potentially benefiting patient-similarity-based precision medicine applications.