# Graph-Enhanced Disease Trajectory Discovery and Temporal Endpoint Forecasting from Longitudinal Electronic Health Records

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20502 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20502/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series with Missing Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01865/) (2016)
- [Med-BERT: pre-trained contextualized embeddings on large-scale structured electronic health records for disease prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12833/) (2020)
- [DeepSurv: Personalized Treatment Recommender System Using A Cox Proportional Hazards Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00931/) (2016)
- [RETAIN: An Interpretable Predictive Model for Healthcare using Reverse Time Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05745/) (2016)
- [BEHRT: Transformer for Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09538/) (2019)
- [Doctor AI: Predicting Clinical Events via Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05942/) (2015)
- [GRAM: Graph-based Attention Model for Healthcare Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07012/) (2016)
- [Pre-training of Graph Augmented Transformers for Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00346/) (2019)
- [Dipole: Diagnosis Prediction in Healthcare via Attention-based Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05764/) (2017)
- [Hi-BEHRT: Hierarchical Transformer-based model for accurate prediction of clinical events using multimodal longitudinal electronic health records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11360/) (2021)
- [Heterogeneous Similarity Graph Neural Network on Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06800/) (2021)
- [Learning Multimorbidity Patterns from Electronic Health Records Using Non-negative Matrix Factorisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08577/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs) can reveal disease-progression structure, while useful forecasting requires leakage-controlled discovery, censor-aware outcomes, and inspectable trajectory evidence. We developed a graph-enhanced framework in MIMIC-IV v3.1 that splits patients before graph construction, learns train-only consecutive-admission transitions, and freezes endpoint-specific branching-motif policies selected on validation data. The final catalog contained 99,527 motifs, and a time-aware Transformer retrieved at most 24 patient-compatible motifs per endpoint through endpoint-specific cross-attention. Across five training seeds, micro-AUPRC increased from 0.9330 to 0.9357, while event-time MAE decreased from 676.9 to 657.7 days (reduction 19.2 days; 95% paired patient-cluster bootstrap CI, 13.8-24.8). Timing effects were heterogeneous: MAE worsened for events within 730 days but improved by 58.9 days for events occurring after 730 days. In an exploratory internal temporal split, branch conditioning reduced conditional event-time MAE by 26.9 days (95% CI, 23.0-30.8) without evidence of better micro-AUPRC. Corrected survival evaluation over the supported 0-2,555-day interval did not establish macro C-index or integrated Brier score superiority over a matched history-only discrete-hazard model. A directed, degree-matched GNN repair substantially improved unseen-edge discovery, yet replacing GNN-derived scores within fixed motif identities did not improve downstream forecasting. These results position branching motifs as structured trajectory context whose main value is long-range timing support rather than uniformly stronger endpoint discrimination, survival prediction, or causal explanation.
