Unveiling Discrete Clues: Superior Healthcare Predictions for Rare Diseases

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Chuang, Tang, Hui, Zhang, Jiheng, Li, Xiaomeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910900082966528
author Zhao, Chuang
Tang, Hui
Zhang, Jiheng
Li, Xiaomeng
author_facet Zhao, Chuang
Tang, Hui
Zhang, Jiheng
Li, Xiaomeng
contents Accurate healthcare prediction is essential for improving patient outcomes. Existing work primarily leverages advanced frameworks like attention or graph networks to capture the intricate collaborative (CO) signals in electronic health records. However, prediction for rare diseases remains challenging due to limited co-occurrence and inadequately tailored approaches. To address this issue, this paper proposes UDC, a novel method that unveils discrete clues to bridge consistent textual knowledge and CO signals within a unified semantic space, thereby enriching the representation semantics of rare diseases. Specifically, we focus on addressing two key sub-problems: (1) acquiring distinguishable discrete encodings for precise disease representation and (2) achieving semantic alignment between textual knowledge and the CO signals at the code level. For the first sub-problem, we refine the standard vector quantized process to include condition awareness. Additionally, we develop an advanced contrastive approach in the decoding stage, leveraging synthetic and mixed-domain targets as hard negatives to enrich the perceptibility of the reconstructed representation for downstream tasks. For the second sub-problem, we introduce a novel codebook update strategy using co-teacher distillation. This approach facilitates bidirectional supervision between textual knowledge and CO signals, thereby aligning semantically equivalent information in a shared discrete latent space. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate our superiority.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_16373
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unveiling Discrete Clues: Superior Healthcare Predictions for Rare Diseases
Zhao, Chuang
Tang, Hui
Zhang, Jiheng
Li, Xiaomeng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Accurate healthcare prediction is essential for improving patient outcomes. Existing work primarily leverages advanced frameworks like attention or graph networks to capture the intricate collaborative (CO) signals in electronic health records. However, prediction for rare diseases remains challenging due to limited co-occurrence and inadequately tailored approaches. To address this issue, this paper proposes UDC, a novel method that unveils discrete clues to bridge consistent textual knowledge and CO signals within a unified semantic space, thereby enriching the representation semantics of rare diseases. Specifically, we focus on addressing two key sub-problems: (1) acquiring distinguishable discrete encodings for precise disease representation and (2) achieving semantic alignment between textual knowledge and the CO signals at the code level. For the first sub-problem, we refine the standard vector quantized process to include condition awareness. Additionally, we develop an advanced contrastive approach in the decoding stage, leveraging synthetic and mixed-domain targets as hard negatives to enrich the perceptibility of the reconstructed representation for downstream tasks. For the second sub-problem, we introduce a novel codebook update strategy using co-teacher distillation. This approach facilitates bidirectional supervision between textual knowledge and CO signals, thereby aligning semantically equivalent information in a shared discrete latent space. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate our superiority.
title Unveiling Discrete Clues: Superior Healthcare Predictions for Rare Diseases
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16373