Title
Temporal Self-Attention Network for Medical Concept Embedding
Abstract
In longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs), the event records of a patient are distributed over a long period of time and the temporal relations between the events reflect sufficient domain knowledge to benefit prediction tasks such as the rate of inpatient mortality. Medical concept embedding as a feature extraction method that transforms a set of medical concepts with a specific time stamp into a vector, which will be fed into a supervised learning algorithm. The quality of the embedding significantly determines the learning performance over the medical data. In this paper, we propose a medical concept embedding method based on applying a self-attention mechanism to represent each medical concept. We propose a novel attention mechanism which captures the contextual information and temporal relationships between medical concepts. A light-weight neural net, "Temporal Self-Attention Network (TeSAN)", is then proposed to learn medical concept embedding based solely on the proposed attention mechanism. To test the effectiveness of our proposed methods, we have conducted clustering and prediction tasks on two public EHRs datasets comparing TeSAN against five state-of-the-art embedding methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TeSAN model is superior to all the compared methods. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to exploit temporal self-attentive relations between medical events.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICDM.2019.00060
2019 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Medical Concept Embedding,Temporal Self Attention,electronic health records,TeSAN,Healthcare
Data mining,Contextual information,Embedding,Domain knowledge,Computer science,Exploit,Feature extraction,Attention network,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Cluster analysis,Machine learning
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1550-4786
978-1-7281-4605-8
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.40
31
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xueping Peng1275.92
Guodong Long265547.27
Tao Shen342.09
Sen Wang447737.24
Jing Jiang513019.52
M. Blumenstein616831.87