The impact of extraneous features on the performance of recurrent neural network models in clinical tasks

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are a rich source of patient information, including measurements reflecting physiologic signs and administered therapies. Identifying which variables or features are useful in predicting clinical outcomes can be challenging. Advanced algorithms, such as deep neural networks, were designed to process high-dimensional inputs containing variables in their measured form, thus bypass separate feature selection or engineering steps. We investigated the effect of extraneous input features on the predictive performance of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) by including in the input vector extraneous features that were randomly drawn from theoretical and empirical distributions. RNN models using different input vectors (EMR features only; EMR and extraneous features; extraneous features only) were trained to predict three clinical outcomes: in-ICU mortality, 72-h ICU re-admission, and 30-day ICU-free days. The measured degradations of the RNN's predictive performance with the inclusion of extraneous features to EMR variables were negligible.