Knowledge Guided Multi-instance Multi-label Learning via Neural Networks in Medicines Prediction

Predicting medicines for patients with co-morbidity has long been recognized as a hard task due to complex dependencies between diseases and medicines. Efforts have been made recently to build high-order dependency between diseases and medicines by extracting knowledge from electronic health records (EHR). But current works failed to utilize additional knowledge and ignored the data skewness problem which lead to sub-optimal combination of medicines. In this paper, we formulate the medicines prediction task in multi-instance multi-label learning framework considering the multi-diagnoses as input instances and multi-medicines as output labels. We propose a knowledge-guided multiinstance multi-label networks called KG-MIML-Net where two types of additional knowledge are incorporated into a RNN encoder-decoder model. The utilization of structural knowledge like clinical ontology provides a way to learn better representation called tree embedding by utilizing the ancestors’ information. Contextual knowledge is a global summarization of input instances which is informative for personal prediction. Experiments are conducted on a real world clinical dataset which showed the necessity to combine both contextual and structural knowledge and the KG-MIML-Net performs better than baselines up to 4+% in terms of Jaccard similarity score.