Counterfactual and Factual Reasoning over Hypergraphs for Interpretable Clinical Predictions on EHR

Proc Mach Learn Res. 2022 Nov:193:259-278.

Abstract

Electronic Health Record modeling is crucial for digital medicine. However, existing models ignore higher-order interactions among medical codes and their causal relations towards downstream clinical predictions. To address such limitations, we propose a novel framework CACHE, to provide effective and insightful clinical predictions based on hypergraph representation learning and counterfactual and factual reasoning techniques. Experiments on two real EHR datasets show the superior performance of CACHE. Case studies with a domain expert illustrate a preferred capability of CACHE in generating clinically meaningful interpretations towards the correct predictions.

Keywords: Counterfactual and Factual Reasoning; EHR; Hypergraph.