Interpretable Predictions of Clinical Outcomes with An Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network

The increasing accumulation of healthcare data provides researchers with ample opportunities to build machine learning approaches for clinical decision support and to improve the quality of health care. Several studies have developed conventional machine learning approaches that rely heavily on manual feature engineering and result in task-specific models for health care. In contrast, healthcare researchers have begun to use deep learning, which has emerged as a revolutionary machine learning technique that obviates manual feature engineering but still achieves impressive results in research fields such as image classification. However, few of them have addressed the lack of the interpretability of deep learning models although interpretability is essential for the successful adoption of machine learning approaches by healthcare communities. In addition, the unique characteristics of healthcare data such as high dimensionality and temporal dependencies pose challenges for building models on healthcare data. To address these challenges, we develop a gated recurrent unit-based recurrent neural network with hierarchical attention for mortality prediction, and then, using the diagnostic codes from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care, we evaluate the model. We find that the prediction accuracy of the model outperforms baseline models and demonstrate the interpretability of the model in visualizations.