# Predicting Patient Outcomes with Graph Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10191/) (2019)
- [Multitask learning and benchmarking with clinical time series data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07771/) (2017)
- [Scalable and accurate deep learning for electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07860/) (2018)
- [dyngraph2vec: Capturing Network Dynamics using Dynamic Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02657/) (2018)
- [Learning Graph Representations with Embedding Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03059/) (2017)
- [Temporal Pointwise Convolutional Networks for Length of Stay Prediction in the Intensive Care Unit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09483/) (2020)
- [Learning Representations of Missing Data for Predicting Patient Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04752/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [A Multimodal Transformer: Fusing Clinical Notes with Structured EHR Data for Interpretable In-Hospital Mortality Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10240/) (2022)
- [Sheaf Hypergraph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17116/) (2023)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Tabular Data Learning: A Survey with Taxonomy and Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02143/) (2024)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Histopathology: Emerging Trends and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12808/) (2024)
- [Investigating the Interplay between Features and Structures in Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09570/) (2023)
- [Graph AI in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13767/) (2023)
- [Leveraging graph neural networks for supporting Automatic Triage of Patients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07038/) (2024)
- [Fair Patient Model: Mitigating Bias in the Patient Representation Learned from the Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03179/) (2023)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Heart Failure Prediction on an EHR-Based Patient Similarity Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19742/) (2024)
- [DynaGraph: Interpretable Multi-Label Prediction from EHRs via Dynamic Graph Learning and Contrastive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22257/) (2025)
- [Advancing Biomedicine with Graph Representation Learning: Recent Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10456/) (2023)
- [AdaMedGraph: Adaboosting Graph Neural Networks for Personalized Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14304/) (2023)
- [Client Recruitment for Federated Learning in ICU Length of Stay Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14663/) (2023)
- [Length of Stay prediction for Hospital Management using Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16823/) (2023)
- [Bridging Graph and State-Space Modeling for Intensive Care Unit Length of Stay Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17554/) (2025)
- [Exploring a Graph-based Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learning for Sepsis Treatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03393/) (2025)
- [Understanding Structured Health Data through Interaction-Aware Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12255/) (2026)
- [CT-HEG: A Bidirectional, Timestamp-Attributed Event Graph for ICU In-Hospital Mortality Prediction - An Architectural Ablation Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02663/) (2026)
- [Patients-like-me: A Variational LM--GNN Framework for Explainable Clinical Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04193/) (2026)
- [Backdoor Learning in Language Models and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18095/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work on predicting patient outcomes in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) has focused heavily on the physiological time series data, largely ignoring sparse data such as diagnoses and medications. When they are included, they are usually concatenated in the late stages of a model, which may struggle to learn from rarer disease patterns. Instead, we propose a strategy to exploit diagnoses as relational information by connecting similar patients in a graph. To this end, we propose LSTM-GNN for patient outcome prediction tasks: a hybrid model combining Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs) for extracting temporal features and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for extracting the patient neighbourhood information. We demonstrate that LSTM-GNNs outperform the LSTM-only baseline on length of stay prediction tasks on the eICU database. More generally, our results indicate that exploiting information from neighbouring patient cases using graph neural networks is a promising research direction, yielding tangible returns in supervised learning performance on Electronic Health Records.