Multi-task Learning via Adaptation to Similar Tasks for Mortality Prediction of Diverse Rare Diseases

The mortality prediction of diverse rare diseases using electronic health record (EHR) data is a crucial task for intelligent healthcare. However, data insufficiency and the clinical diversity of rare diseases make it hard for deep learning models to be trained. Mortality prediction for these patients with different diseases can be viewed as a multi-task learning problem with insufficient data but a large number of tasks. On the other hand, insufficient training data makes it difficult to train task-specific modules in multi-task learning models. To address the challenges of data insufficiency and task diversity, we propose an initialization-sharing multi-task learning method (Ada-SiT). Ada-Sit can learn the parameter initialization and dynamically measure the tasks' similarities, used for fast adaptation. We use Ada-SiT to train long short-term memory networks (LSTM) based prediction models on longitudinal EHR data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective for mortality prediction of diverse rare diseases.