Temporal SelfAttention Network for Medical Concept Embedding In longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs), the event records of a patient are distributed over a long period of time and the temporal relations between the events reflect sufficient domain knowledge to benefit prediction tasks such as the rate of inpatient mortality. Medical concept embedding as a feature extraction method that transforms a set of medical concepts with a specific time stamp into a vector, which will be fed into a supervised learning algorithm. The quality of the embedding significantly determines the learning performance over the medical data. In this paper, we propose a medical concept embedding method based on applying a selfattention mechanism to represent each medical concept. We propose a novel attention mechanism which captures the contextual information and temporal relationships between medical concepts. A lightweight neural net, Temporal SelfAttention Network (TeSAN), is then proposed to learn medical concept embedding based solely on the proposed attention mechanism. To test the effectiveness of our proposed methods, we have conducted clustering and prediction tasks on two public EHRs datasets comparing TeSAN against five stateoftheart embedding methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TeSAN model is superior to all the compared methods. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to exploit temporal selfattentive relations between medical events.

Predictive Multilevel Patient Representations from Electronic Health Records The advent of the Internet era has led to an explosive growth in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) in the past decades. The EHR data can be regarded as a collection of clinical events, including laboratory results, medication records, physiological indicators, etc, which can be used for clinical outcome prediction tasks to support constructions of intelligent health systems. Learning patient representation from these clinical events for the clinical outcome prediction is an important but challenging step. Most related studies transform EHR data of a patient into a sequence of clinical events in temporal order and then use sequential models to learn patient representations for outcome prediction. However, clinical event sequence contains thousands of event types and temporal dependencies. We further make an observation that clinical events occurring in a short period are not constrained by any temporal order but events in a long term are influenced by temporal dependencies. The multiscale temporal property makes it difficult for traditional sequential models to capture the shortterm cooccurrence and the longterm temporal dependencies in clinical event sequences. In response to the above challenges, this paper proposes a Multilevel Representation Model (MRM). MRM first uses a sparse attention mechanism to model the shortterm cooccurrence, then uses intervalbased event pooling to remove redundant information and reduce sequence length and finally predicts clinical outcomes through Long ShortTerm Memory (LSTM). Experiments on realworld datasets indicate that our proposed model largely improves the performance of clinical outcome prediction tasks using EHR data.