Identifying Critical Phases for Disease Onset with Sparse Haematological Biomarkers

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zerio, Andrea, Bechler-Speicher, Maya, Jess, Tine, Sazonovs, Aleksejs
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zerio, Andrea
Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Jess, Tine
Sazonovs, Aleksejs
author_facet Zerio, Andrea
Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Jess, Tine
Sazonovs, Aleksejs
contents Routinely collected clinical blood tests are an emerging molecular data source for large-scale biomedical research but inherently feature irregular sampling and informative observation. Traditional approaches rely on imputation, which can distort learning signals and bias predictions while lacking biological interpretability. We propose a novel methodology using Graph Neural Additive Networks (GNAN) to model biomarker trajectories as time-weighted directed graphs, where nodes represent sampling events and edges encode the time delta between events. GNAN's additive structure enables the explicit decomposition of feature and temporal contributions, allowing the detection of critical disease-associated time points. Unlike conventional imputation-based approaches, our method preserves the temporal structure of sparse data without introducing artificial biases and provides inherently interpretable predictions by decomposing contributions from each biomarker and time interval. This makes our model clinically applicable, as well as allowing it to discover biologically meaningful disease signatures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14561
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying Critical Phases for Disease Onset with Sparse Haematological Biomarkers
Zerio, Andrea
Bechler-Speicher, Maya
Jess, Tine
Sazonovs, Aleksejs
Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
Routinely collected clinical blood tests are an emerging molecular data source for large-scale biomedical research but inherently feature irregular sampling and informative observation. Traditional approaches rely on imputation, which can distort learning signals and bias predictions while lacking biological interpretability. We propose a novel methodology using Graph Neural Additive Networks (GNAN) to model biomarker trajectories as time-weighted directed graphs, where nodes represent sampling events and edges encode the time delta between events. GNAN's additive structure enables the explicit decomposition of feature and temporal contributions, allowing the detection of critical disease-associated time points. Unlike conventional imputation-based approaches, our method preserves the temporal structure of sparse data without introducing artificial biases and provides inherently interpretable predictions by decomposing contributions from each biomarker and time interval. This makes our model clinically applicable, as well as allowing it to discover biologically meaningful disease signatures.
title Identifying Critical Phases for Disease Onset with Sparse Haematological Biomarkers
topic Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14561