Hierarchical Adaptive Multi-task Learning Framework for Patient Diagnoses and Diagnostic Category Classification

Abstract

The problems a patient suffers from can be summarized in terms of a list of patient diagnoses. The diagnoses are typically organized in a hierarchy (or a lattice structure) in which many different low-level diagnoses are covered by one or more diagnostic categories. An interesting machine learning problem is related to learning of a wide range of diagnostic models (at different levels of abstraction) that can automatically assign a diagnosis or a diagnostic category to a specific patient. While one can always approach this problem by learning models for each diagnostic task independently, an interesting open question is how one can leverage the knowledge of a diagnostic hierarchy to improve the classification and outperform independent diagnostic models. In this work, we study this problem by designing a new hierarchical classification learning framework in which multiple diagnostic classification targets are explicitly related via diagnostic hierarchy relations. By conducting experiments on MIMIC-III data and ICD-9 diagnosis hierarchy, we demonstrate that our framework leads to improved classification performance on individual diagnostic tasks when compared to independently learned diagnostic models. This improvement is stronger for diagnoses with a low prior and smaller number of positive training examples.