# Combining LSTM and Latent Topic Modeling for Mortality Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02842/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [What Do You See in this Patient? Behavioral Testing of Clinical NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15512/) (2021)
- [Fair Patient Model: Mitigating Bias in the Patient Representation Learned from the Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03179/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is a great need for technologies that can predict the mortality of patients in intensive care units with both high accuracy and accountability. We present joint end-to-end neural network architectures that combine long short-term memory (LSTM) and a latent topic model to simultaneously train a classifier for mortality prediction and learn latent topics indicative of mortality from textual clinical notes. For topic interpretability, the topic modeling layer has been carefully designed as a single-layer network with constraints inspired by LDA. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that our models significantly outperform prior models that are based on LDA topics in mortality prediction. However, we achieve limited success with our method for interpreting topics from the trained models by looking at the neural network weights.