No Black Box Anymore: Demystifying Clinical Predictive Modeling with Temporal-Feature Cross Attention Mechanism

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Hauptverfasser: Li, Yubo, Yao, Xinyu, Padman, Rema
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Yubo
Yao, Xinyu
Padman, Rema
author_facet Li, Yubo
Yao, Xinyu
Padman, Rema
contents Despite the outstanding performance of deep learning models in clinical prediction tasks, explainability remains a significant challenge. Inspired by transformer architectures, we introduce the Temporal-Feature Cross Attention Mechanism (TFCAM), a novel deep learning framework designed to capture dynamic interactions among clinical features across time, enhancing both predictive accuracy and interpretability. In an experiment with 1,422 patients with Chronic Kidney Disease, predicting progression to End-Stage Renal Disease, TFCAM outperformed LSTM and RETAIN baselines, achieving an AUROC of 0.95 and an F1-score of 0.69. Beyond performance gains, TFCAM provides multi-level explainability by identifying critical temporal periods, ranking feature importance, and quantifying how features influence each other across time before affecting predictions. Our approach addresses the "black box" limitations of deep learning in healthcare, offering clinicians transparent insights into disease progression mechanisms while maintaining state-of-the-art predictive performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_19285
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle No Black Box Anymore: Demystifying Clinical Predictive Modeling with Temporal-Feature Cross Attention Mechanism
Li, Yubo
Yao, Xinyu
Padman, Rema
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Despite the outstanding performance of deep learning models in clinical prediction tasks, explainability remains a significant challenge. Inspired by transformer architectures, we introduce the Temporal-Feature Cross Attention Mechanism (TFCAM), a novel deep learning framework designed to capture dynamic interactions among clinical features across time, enhancing both predictive accuracy and interpretability. In an experiment with 1,422 patients with Chronic Kidney Disease, predicting progression to End-Stage Renal Disease, TFCAM outperformed LSTM and RETAIN baselines, achieving an AUROC of 0.95 and an F1-score of 0.69. Beyond performance gains, TFCAM provides multi-level explainability by identifying critical temporal periods, ranking feature importance, and quantifying how features influence each other across time before affecting predictions. Our approach addresses the "black box" limitations of deep learning in healthcare, offering clinicians transparent insights into disease progression mechanisms while maintaining state-of-the-art predictive performance.
title No Black Box Anymore: Demystifying Clinical Predictive Modeling with Temporal-Feature Cross Attention Mechanism
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19285