Graph Convolution Synthetic Transformer for Chronic Kidney Disease Onset Prediction

Di Zhu, Yi Liu, Weitong Chen, Yanda Wang, Yefan Huang, Xiaoli Wang, Ken Cai, Bohan Li

Abstract: Effective disease prediction based on electronic health records (EHR) is an important topic in health informatics. The current methods usually use common deep-learning models for disease prediction. However, it is difficult to fully learn the graphic encounter structure of EHR to improve prediction performance. Moreover, in prediction tasks, chronic kidney disease (CKD) has a poor prognosis due to excessive risk factors and complex comorbidities. Therefore, we propose a CKD onset prediction model called Graph Convolution Synthetic Transformer (GCST) based on EHR, using Fusion Attention Mechanism to solve these challenges. By modifying Transformer, GCST uses Factorized Dense Attention and Medical Local Attention to learn global and local attention, generating Synthetic Attention to learn the potential encounter structure and meaningful medical knowledge of EHR. In addition, we also propose a transfer learning strategy based on sample weighted correction to guide the prediction of GCST in specific low-resource EHR. We conduct sufficient experiments on three datasets to test the performance of GCST. Experiments show that GCST has significant improvement over state-of-the-art models.