Abstract
In recent years, machine learning methods have been rapidly implemented in the medical domain. However, current state-of-the-art methods usually produce opaque, black-box models. To address the lack of model transparency, substantial attention has been given to develop interpretable machine learning methods. In the medical domain, counterfactuals can provide example-based explanations for predictions, and show practitioners the modifications required to change a prediction from an undesired to a desired state. In this paper, we propose a counterfactual explanation solution for predicting the survival of cardiovascular ICU patients, by representing their electronic health record as a sequence of medical events, and generating counterfactuals by adopting and employing a text style-transfer technique. Experimental results on the MIMIC-III dataset strongly suggest that text style-transfer methods can be effectively adapted for the problem of counterfactual explanations in healthcare applications and can achieve competitive performance in terms of counterfactual validity, BLEU-4 and local outlier metrics.
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This work was supported in part the EXTREMUM collaborative project of the Digital Futures framework.
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Wang, Z., Samsten, I., Papapetrou, P. (2021). Counterfactual Explanations for Survival Prediction of Cardiovascular ICU Patients. In: Tucker, A., Henriques Abreu, P., Cardoso, J., Pereira Rodrigues, P., Riaño, D. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. AIME 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12721. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77211-6_38
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