Hierarchical Gaussian Processes and Mixtures of Experts to Model COVID-19 Patient Trajectories

Gaussian processes (GPs) are a versatile nonparametric model for nonlinear regression and have been widely used to study spatiotemporal phenomena. However, standard GPs offer limited interpretability and generalizability for datasets with naturally occurring hierarchies. With large-scale, rapidly-updating electronic health record (EHR) data, we want to study patient trajectories across diverse patient cohorts while preserving patient subgroup structure. In this work, we partition our cohort of over 2000 COVID-19 patients by sex and ethnicity. We develop and apply a hierarchical Gaussian process and a mixture of experts (MOE) hierarchical GP model to fit patient trajectories on clinical markers of disease progression. A case study for albumin, an effective predictor of COVID-19 patient outcomes, highlights the predictive performance of these models. These hierarchical spatiotemporal models of EHR data bring us a step closer toward our goal of building flexible approaches to capture patient data that can be used in real-time systems*.