Multi-perspective patient representation learning for disease prediction on electronic health records

Patient representation learning based on electronic health records (EHR) is a critical task for disease prediction. This task aims to effectively extract useful information on dynamic features. Although various existing works have achieved remarkable progress, the model performance can be further improved by fully extracting the trends, variations, and the correlation between the trends and variations in dynamic features. In addition, sparse visit records limit the performance of deep learning models. To address these issues, we propose the multi-perspective patient representation Extractor (MPRE) for disease prediction. Specifically, we propose frequency transformation module (FTM) to extract the trend and variation information of dynamic features in the time–frequency domain, which can enhance the feature representation. In the 2D multi-extraction network (2D MEN), we form the 2D temporal tensor based on trend and variation. Then, the correlations between trend and variation are captured by the proposed dilated operation. Moreover, we propose the first-order difference attention mechanism (FODAM) to calculate the contributions of differences in adjacent variations to the disease diagnosis adaptively. To evaluate the performance of MPRE and baseline methods, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world public datasets. The experiment results show that MPRE outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of AUROC and AUPRC.