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Explanation Beyond Individual Features: Instance-wise Feature Grouping for EHR Predictive Analytics

delete2025-11-06
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C
Chin Wang Cheong *
K
Kejing Yin
W
William K. Cheung
I
Ivor W. Tsang
DOI:10.1007/s41666-025-00222-8delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Identifying relevant input features which contribute to the output of a clinical prediction model can enhance the model explainability. To allow the explainability to be more personalized, instance-wise feature selection (IWFS) methods can be adopted where features are selected specifically for each input instance. Existing IWFS methods often grapple with feature selection instability, and thus precarious interpretation. As relevant features among the instances in a dataset do overlap, feature grouping tricks have been proposed to regularize the selection, but often at the expense of sacrificing the downstream prediction accuracy. To this end, we propose a novel instance-wise feature grouping method called FlexGPC to achieve robust and stable selection by learning i) flexible representation for feature groups, and ii) flexible combination of feature groups implemented using neural networks. To evaluate the effectiveness of FlexGPC, we explore various feature group combination schemes and conduct extensive experiments for performance comparison using real-world electronic health records (EHR) data. Our experimental results show that FlexGPC outperforms all the SOTA baselines in terms of accuracy and feature selection stability for both downstream mortality and next-admission diagnosis prediction tasks. We also illustrate that computational phenotyping can be achieved at the same time, with the identified feature groups being the potential phenotypes.
Keywords:
Explanability
Feature selection
Deep learning
Electronic health records
Predictive analytics
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Journal

J
Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research
IF:
3.7
Papers:
193
Citations:
671

Organization

S
School of Computer Science
Scholars:
894
Papers: 427
Citations: 0
D
Department of Computer Science
Scholars:
1.7K
Papers: 998
Citations: 8