HiRef: Leveraging Hierarchical Ontology and Network Refinement for Robust Medication Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chok, Yan Ting, Park, Soyon, Baek, Seungheun, Kim, Hajung, Lee, Junhyun, Kang, Jaewoo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chok, Yan Ting
Park, Soyon
Baek, Seungheun
Kim, Hajung
Lee, Junhyun
Kang, Jaewoo
author_facet Chok, Yan Ting
Park, Soyon
Baek, Seungheun
Kim, Hajung
Lee, Junhyun
Kang, Jaewoo
contents Medication recommendation is a crucial task for assisting physicians in making timely decisions from longitudinal patient medical records. However, real-world EHR data present significant challenges due to the presence of rarely observed medical entities and incomplete records that may not fully capture the clinical ground truth. While data-driven models trained on longitudinal Electronic Health Records often achieve strong empirical performance, they struggle to generalize under missing or novel conditions, largely due to their reliance on observed co-occurrence patterns. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Ontology and Network Refinement for Robust Medication Recommendation (HiRef), a unified framework that combines two complementary structures: (i) the hierarchical semantics encoded in curated medical ontologies, and (ii) refined co-occurrence patterns derived from real-world EHRs. We embed ontology entities in hyperbolic space, which naturally captures tree-like relationships and enables knowledge transfer through shared ancestors, thereby improving generalizability to unseen codes. To further improve robustness, we introduce a prior-guided sparse regularization scheme that refines the EHR co-occurrence graph by suppressing spurious edges while preserving clinically meaningful associations. Our model achieves strong performance on EHR benchmarks (MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV) and maintains high accuracy under simulated unseen-code settings. Extensive experiments with comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate HiRef's resilience to unseen medical codes, supported by in-depth analyses of the learned sparsified graph structure and medical code embeddings.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10425
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HiRef: Leveraging Hierarchical Ontology and Network Refinement for Robust Medication Recommendation
Chok, Yan Ting
Park, Soyon
Baek, Seungheun
Kim, Hajung
Lee, Junhyun
Kang, Jaewoo
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Medication recommendation is a crucial task for assisting physicians in making timely decisions from longitudinal patient medical records. However, real-world EHR data present significant challenges due to the presence of rarely observed medical entities and incomplete records that may not fully capture the clinical ground truth. While data-driven models trained on longitudinal Electronic Health Records often achieve strong empirical performance, they struggle to generalize under missing or novel conditions, largely due to their reliance on observed co-occurrence patterns. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Ontology and Network Refinement for Robust Medication Recommendation (HiRef), a unified framework that combines two complementary structures: (i) the hierarchical semantics encoded in curated medical ontologies, and (ii) refined co-occurrence patterns derived from real-world EHRs. We embed ontology entities in hyperbolic space, which naturally captures tree-like relationships and enables knowledge transfer through shared ancestors, thereby improving generalizability to unseen codes. To further improve robustness, we introduce a prior-guided sparse regularization scheme that refines the EHR co-occurrence graph by suppressing spurious edges while preserving clinically meaningful associations. Our model achieves strong performance on EHR benchmarks (MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV) and maintains high accuracy under simulated unseen-code settings. Extensive experiments with comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate HiRef's resilience to unseen medical codes, supported by in-depth analyses of the learned sparsified graph structure and medical code embeddings.
title HiRef: Leveraging Hierarchical Ontology and Network Refinement for Robust Medication Recommendation
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10425