Leveraging Clinical Time-Series Data for Prediction: A Cautionary Tale

In healthcare, patient risk stratification models are often learned using time-series data extracted from electronic health records. When extracting data for a clinical prediction task, several formulations exist, depending on how one chooses the time of prediction and the prediction horizon. In this paper, we show how the formulation can greatly impact both model performance and clinical utility. Leveraging a publicly available ICU dataset, we consider two clinical prediction tasks: in-hospital mortality, and hypokalemia. Through these case studies, we demonstrate the necessity of evaluating models using an outcome-independent reference point, since choosing the time of prediction relative to the event can result in unrealistic performance. Further, an outcome-independent scheme outperforms an outcome-dependent scheme on both tasks (In-Hospital Mortality AUROC .882 vs. .831; Serum Potassium: AUROC .829 vs. .740) when evaluated on test sets that mimic real-world use.