An adaptive federated learning framework for clinical risk prediction with electronic health records from multiple hospitals.

Clinical risk prediction with electronic health records (EHR) using machine learning has attracted lots of attentions in recent years, where one of the key challenges is how to protect data privacy. Federated learning (FL) provides a promising framework for building predictive models by leveraging the data from multiple institutions without sharing them. However, data distribution drift across different institutions greatly impacts the performance of FL. In this paper, an adaptive FL framework was proposed to address this challenge. Our framework separated the input features into stable, domain-specific, and conditional-irrelevant parts according to their relationships to clinical outcomes. We evaluate this framework on the tasks of predicting the onset risk of sepsis and acute kidney injury (AKI) for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) from multiple clinical institutions. The results showed that our framework can achieve better prediction performance compared with existing FL baselines and provide reasonable feature interpretations.