Survival analysis models have evolved significantly with deep learning approaches, yet often lack interpretability and meaningful risk stratification capabilities. We present Interpretable Risk Clustering Intelligence for Survival Analysis (IRIS), a novel framework that addresses the critical task of risk clustering while enhancing both input-level and model-body interpretability. Unlike traditional survival models that perform post-hoc risk clustering, IRIS learns to cluster patients into meaningful risk groups directly from data while providing transparent feature importance estimation through feature contribution functions. We validate IRIS on several benchmark datasets, a real-world Alzheimer's disease dataset, and an electronic health record dataset, showing superior performance in risk clustering and predictive reliability with only a modest decrease in time-toevent prediction accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our results show that IRIS successfully balances the trade-off between interpretability and prediction performance in riskbased survival analysis, offering clinicians actionable insights for treatment planning and resource allocation.
Clinical time series are often irregularly sampled, with varying sensor frequencies, missing observations, and misaligned timestamps. Prior approaches typically address these irregularities by interpolating data into regular sequences, thereby introducing bias, or by generating inconsistent and uninterpretable relationships across sensor measurements, complicating the accurate learning of both intra-series and inter-series dependencies. We introduce WaveGNN, a model that operates directly on irregular multivariate time series without interpolation or conversion to a regular representation. WaveGNN combines a decay-aware Transformer to capture intra-series dynamics with a sample-specific graph neural network that models both short-term and long-term inter-sensor relationships. Therefore, it generates a single, sparse, and interpretable graph per sample. Across multiple benchmark datasets (P12, P19, MIMIC-III, and PAM), WaveGNN delivers consistently strong performance, whereas other state-of-the-art baselines tend to perform well on some datasets or tasks but poorly on others. While WaveGNN does not necessarily surpass every method in every case, its consistency and robustness across diverse settings set it apart. Moreover, the learned graphs align well with known physiological structures, enhancing interpretability and supporting clinical decision-making.
Federated learning (FL) for distributed data has gained significant attention by enabling model training on local data without transferring it to a central system. While this approach protects sensitive information, risks of data leakage still persist, necessitating the integration of privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy. In many FL applications, tasks like exploratory data analysis or tracking and monitoring data that change over time are essential. For these purposes, analysts rely on data visualizations to make decisions or draw conclusions. This vision paper emphasizes the importance of federated privacy-preserving visualization and outlines a general pipeline for its implementation. We discuss the challenges of integrating federated visualizations with differential privacy and demonstrate the feasibility of this approach through examples, such as federated privacy-preserving boxplots, scatterplots, and correlation visualizations in neuroimaging. This highlights the need for further research in this promising field.
Learning from massive amounts of domain-specific information requires new algorithms and models for parsing the ever-expanding field of big data. Such algorithms for exploring and identifying key features in vast databases require analysis of complex interactions to uncover critical features under a variety of circumstances. We study a comprehensive collection of health-related data, showing that our novel Choquet Integral activation function for deep neural networks transforms high-dimensional data into simpler sub-feature sets that better model complex interactions. While standard methods account for unitary feature tracking, they do not extend to multiple feature subsets, an impactful and necessary knowledge base. To this end, our novel activation function creates a sub-additive tool that better considers the weighted compilation of features within a robust set of standard benchmarks, advancing the synergistic and antagonistic relationships among features, capturing non-linear dependencies. We present the theoretical underpinnings, highlighting balanced fuzzy measures and sub-additivity for an optimized model based on real-world health data targeting weight loss. We further test different model settings, akin to hyper-parameter optimization. Despite computational time consumption, which could be improved via nowadays more powerful computing units, this novel method can be implemented as a pre-trained model using big data to identify heretofore unknown sub-additive feature interactions in a variety of fields such as biomedicine, fraud detection, cyber-security, and finance.
This paper presents CLINICSUM, a novel framework designed to automatically generate clinical summaries from patient-doctor conversations. It utilizes a two-module architecture: a retrieval-based filtering module that extracts Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan (SOAP) information from conversation transcripts, and an inference module powered by fine-tuned Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), which leverage the extracted SOAP data to generate abstracted clinical summaries. To fine-tune the PLM, we created a training dataset of consisting 1,473 conversations-summaries pair by consolidating two publicly available datasets, FigShare and MTS-Dialog, with ground truth summaries validated by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). CLINICSUM’s effectiveness is evaluated through both automatic metrics (e.g., ROUGE, BERTScore) and expert human assessments. Results show that CLINICSUM outperforms state-of-the-art PLMs, demonstrating superior precision, recall, and F-1 scores in automatic evaluations and receiving high preference from SMEs in human assessment, making it a robust solution for automated clinical summarization.
