The vast amount of health data has been continuously collected for each patient, providing opportunities to support diverse healthcare predictive tasks such as seizure detection and hospitalization prediction. Existing models are mostly trained on other patients data and evaluated on new patients. Many of them might suffer from poor generalizability. One key reason can be overfitting due to the unique information related to patient identities and their data collection environments, referred to as patient covariates in the paper. These patient covariates usually do not contribute to predicting the targets but are often difficult to remove. As a result, they can bias the model training process and impede generalization. In healthcare applications, most existing domain generalization methods assume a small number of domains. In this paper, considering the diversity of patient covariates, we propose a new setting by treating each patient as a separate domain (leading to many domains). We develop a new domain generalization method ManyDG, that can scale to such many-domain problems. Our method identifies the patient domain covariates by mutual reconstruction and removes them via an orthogonal projection step. Extensive experiments show that ManyDG can boost the generalization performance on multiple real-world healthcare tasks (e.g., 3.7% Jaccard improvements on MIMIC drug recommendation) and support realistic but challenging settings such as insufficient data and continuous learning.

通过相互重构和正交投影步骤，提出了新的域泛化方法ManyDG来解决医疗保健任务中患者特征数据对模型训练的影响问题，实验表明该方法可以显著提高多个真实世界医疗保健任务的泛化性能。

ManyDG：面向医疗应用的多领域泛化