Enhancing Rare Codes via Probability-Biased Directed Graph Attention for Long-Tail ICD Coding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Tianlei, Chen, Yuxiao, Li, Yang, Wang, Feifei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chen, Tianlei
Chen, Yuxiao
Li, Yang
Wang, Feifei
author_facet Chen, Tianlei
Chen, Yuxiao
Li, Yang
Wang, Feifei
contents Automated international classification of diseases (ICD) coding aims to assign multiple disease codes to clinical documents and plays a critical role in healthcare informatics. However, its performance is hindered by the extreme long-tail distribution of the ICD ontology, where a few common codes dominate while thousands of rare codes have very few examples. To address this issue, we propose a Probability-Biased Directed Graph Attention model (ProBias) that partitions codes into common and rare sets and allows information to flow only from common to rare codes. Edge weights are determined by conditional co-occurrence probabilities, which guide the attention mechanism to enrich rare-code representations with clinically related signals. To provide higher-quality semantic representations as model inputs, we further employ large language models to generate enriched textual descriptions for ICD codes, offering external clinical context that complements statistical co-occurrence signals. Applied to automated ICD coding, our approach significantly improves the representation and prediction of rare codes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets. In particular, we observe substantial gains in macro-averaged F1 score, a key metric for long-tail classification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09559
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Rare Codes via Probability-Biased Directed Graph Attention for Long-Tail ICD Coding
Chen, Tianlei
Chen, Yuxiao
Li, Yang
Wang, Feifei
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Automated international classification of diseases (ICD) coding aims to assign multiple disease codes to clinical documents and plays a critical role in healthcare informatics. However, its performance is hindered by the extreme long-tail distribution of the ICD ontology, where a few common codes dominate while thousands of rare codes have very few examples. To address this issue, we propose a Probability-Biased Directed Graph Attention model (ProBias) that partitions codes into common and rare sets and allows information to flow only from common to rare codes. Edge weights are determined by conditional co-occurrence probabilities, which guide the attention mechanism to enrich rare-code representations with clinically related signals. To provide higher-quality semantic representations as model inputs, we further employ large language models to generate enriched textual descriptions for ICD codes, offering external clinical context that complements statistical co-occurrence signals. Applied to automated ICD coding, our approach significantly improves the representation and prediction of rare codes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets. In particular, we observe substantial gains in macro-averaged F1 score, a key metric for long-tail classification.
title Enhancing Rare Codes via Probability-Biased Directed Graph Attention for Long-Tail ICD Coding
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09559