A Curriculum Batching Strategy for Automatic ICD Coding with Deep Multi-Label Classification Models

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) has an important role in building applications for clinical medicine. Extremely large ICD coding label sets and imbalanced label distribution bring the problem of inconsistency between the local batch data distribution and the global training data distribution into the minibatch gradient descent (MBGD)-based training procedure for deep multi-label classification models for automatic ICD coding. The problem further leads to an overfitting issue. In order to improve the performance and generalization ability of the deep learning automatic ICD coding model, we proposed a simple and effective curriculum batching strategy in this paper for improving the MBGD-based training procedure. This strategy generates three batch sets offline through applying three predefined sampling algorithms. These batch sets satisfy a uniform data distribution, a shuffling data distribution and the original training data distribution, respectively, and the learning tasks corresponding to these batch sets range from simple to complex. Experiments show that, after replacing the original shuffling algorithm-based batching strategy with the proposed curriculum batching strategy, the performance of the three investigated deep multi-label classification models for automatic ICD coding all have dramatic improvements. At the same time, the models avoid the overfitting issue and all show better ability to learn the long-tailed label information. The performance is also better than a SOTA label set reconstruction model.