2021/11/15 by Niall Taylor, Taylor, Niall, Lei Sha +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning in Healthcare #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2111.07611
openalex publication_date 2021/11/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The development of neural networks for clinical artificial intelligence (AI) is reliant on interpretability, transparency, and performance. The need to delve into the black-box neural network and derive interpretable explanations of model output is paramount. A task of high clinical importance is predicting the likelihood of a patient being readmitted to hospital in the near future to enable efficient triage. With the increasing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), there is great interest in applications of natural language processing (NLP) to clinical free-text contained within EHRs. In this work, we apply InfoCal, the current state-of-the-art model that produces extractive rationales for its predictions, to the task of predicting hospital readmission using hospital discharge notes. We compare extractive rationales produced by InfoCal to competitive transformer-based models pretrained on clinical text data and for which the attention mechanism can be used for interpretation. We find each presented model with selected interpretability or feature importance methods yield varying results, with clinical language domain expertise and pretraining critical to performance and subsequent interpretability.