Multi-View Integrative Attention-Based Deep Representation Learning for Irregular Clinical Time-Series Data

Electronic health record (EHR) data are sparse and irregular as they are recorded at irregular time intervals, and different clinical variables are measured at each observation point. In this work, to handle irregular multivariate time-series data, we consider the human knowledge of the aspects to be measured and time to measure them in different situations, known as multi-view features, which are indirectly represented in the data. We propose a scheme to realize multi-view features integration learning via a self-attention mechanism. Specifically, we devise a novel multi-integration attention module (MIAM) to extract complex information that is inherent in irregular time-series data. We explicitly learn the relationships among the observed values, missing indicators, and time interval between the consecutive observations in a simultaneous manner. In addition, we build an attention-based decoder as a missing value imputer that helps empower the representation learning of the interrelations among multi-view observations for the prediction task this decoder operates only in the training phase so that the final model is implemented in an imputation-free manner. We validated the effectiveness of our method over the public MIMIC-III and PhysioNet challenge 2012 datasets by comparing with and outperforming the state-of-the-art methods in three downstream tasks i.e., prediction of the in-hospital mortality, prediction of the length of stay, and phenotyping. Moreover, we conduct a layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) analysis based on case studies to highlight the explainability of the trained model.