Multi-task Learning via Adaptation to Similar Tasks for Mortality Prediction of Diverse Rare Diseases

Mortality prediction of diverse rare diseases using electronic health record (EHR) data is a crucial task for intelligent healthcare. However, data insufficiency and the clinical diversity of rare diseases make it hard for directly training deep learning models on individual disease data or all the data from different diseases. Mortality prediction for these patients with different diseases can be viewed as a multi-task learning problem with insufficient data and large task number. But the tasks with little training data also make it hard to train task-specific modules in multi-task learning models. To address the challenges of data insufficiency and task diversity, we propose an initialization-sharing multi-task learning method (Ada-Sit) which learns the parameter initialization for fast adaptation to dynamically measured similar tasks. We use Ada-Sit to train long short-term memory networks (LSTM) based prediction models on longitudinal EHR data. And experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective for mortality prediction of diverse rare diseases.