Diversity-Promoting and Large-Scale Machine Learning for Healthcare
Creators: name: Pengtao Xie
Publisher: name: Carnegie Mellon University
Year: 2018
Subjects: subject: 170203 Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: In healthcare, a tsunami of medical data has emerged, including electronic health<br>records, images, literature, etc. These data are heterogeneous and noisy, which renders<br>clinical decision-makings time-consuming, error-prone, and suboptimal. In this thesis, we develop machine learning (ML) models and systems for distilling highvalue patterns from unstructured clinical data and making informed and real-time<br>medical predictions and recommendations, to aid physicians in improving the efficiency<br>of workflow and the quality of patient care. When developing these models, we encounter several challenges: (1) How to better capture infrequent clinical patterns,<br>such as rare subtypes of diseases; (2) How to make the models generalize well on unseen patients? (3) How to promote the interpretability of the decisions? (4)<br>How to improve the timeliness of decision-making without sacrificing its quality?<br>(5) How to efficiently discover massive clinical patterns from large-scale data?<br>To address challenges (1-4), we systematically study diversity-promoting learning, which encourages the components in ML models (1) to diversely spread out to<br>give infrequent patterns a broader coverage, (2) to be imposed with structured constraints for better generalization performance, (3) to be mutually complementary for<br>more compact representation of information, and (4) to be less redundant for better interpretability. The study is performed in both frequentist statistics and Bayesian<br>statistics. In the former, we develop diversity-promoting regularizers that are empirically effective, theoretically analyzable, and computationally efficient, and propose<br>a rich set of optimization algorithms to solve the regularized problems. In the latter, we propose Bayesian priors that can effectively entail an inductive bias of “diversity”<br>among a finite or infinite number of components and develop efficient posterior inference algorithms. We provide theoretical analysis on why promoting diversity can<br>better capture infrequent betters and improve generalization. The developed regularizers and priors are demonstrated to be effective in a wide range of ML models.<br>To address challenge (5), we study large-scale learning. Specifically, we design efficient distributed ML systems by exploiting a system-algorithm co-design<br>approach. Inspired by a sufficient factor property of many ML models, we design a peer-to-peer system – Orpheus – that significantly reduces communication and<br>fault tolerance costs. We also provide theoretical analysis showing that algorithms executed on Orpheus are guaranteed to converge. The efficiency of our system is<br>demonstrated in several large-scale applications.<br>We apply the proposed diversity-promoting learning (DPL) techniques and the distributed ML system to solve healthcare problems. In a similar-patient retrieval<br>application, DPL shows great effectiveness in improving retrieval performance on infrequent diseases, enabling fast and accurate retrieval, and reducing overfitting.<br>In a medical-topic discovery task, our Orpheus system is able to extract tens of thousands of topics from millions of documents in a few hours. Besides these two<br>applications, we also design effective ML models for hierarchical multi-label tagging<br>of medical images and automated ICD coding.