CDR-Detector: a chronic disease risk prediction model combining pre-training with deep reinforcement learning

Chronic disease risk prediction based on electronic health record (EHR) is an important research direction of Internet healthcare. Current studies mainly focused on developing well-designed deep learning models to predict the disease risk based on large-scale and high-quality longitudinal EHR data. However, in real-world scenarios, people’s medical habits and low prevalence of diseases often lead to few-shot and imbalanced longitudinal EHR data. This has become an urgent challenge for chronic disease risk prediction based on EHR. Aiming at this challenge, this study combines EHR based pre-training and deep reinforcement learning to develop a novel chronic disease risk prediction model called CDR-Detector. The model adopts the Q-learning architecture with a custom reward function. In order to improve the few-shot learning ability of model, a self-adaptive EHR based pre-training model with two new pre-training tasks is developed to mine valuable dependencies from single-visit EHR data. In order to solve the problem of data imbalance, a dual experience replay strategy is realized to help the model select representative data samples and accelerate model convergence on the imbalanced EHR data. A group of experiments have been conducted on real personal physical examination data. Experimental results show that, compared with the existing state-of-art methods, the proposed CDR-Detector has better accuracy and robustness on the few-shot and imbalanced EHR data.