Embeddings of medical concepts such as medication, procedure and diagnosis
codes in Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are central to healthcare analytics.
Previous work on medical concept embedding takes medical concepts and EMRs as
words and documents respectively. Nevertheless, such models miss out the
temporal nature of EMR data. On the one hand, two consecutive medical concepts
do not indicate they are temporally close, but the correlations between them
can be revealed by the time gap. On the other hand, the temporal scopes of
medical concepts often vary greatly (e.g., \textit{common cold} and
\textit{diabetes}). In this paper, we propose to incorporate the temporal
information to embed medical codes. Based on the Continuous Bag-of-Words model,
we employ the attention mechanism to learn a "soft" time-aware context window
for each medical concept. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets
through clustering and nearest neighbour search tasks demonstrate the
effectiveness of our model, showing that it outperforms five state-of-the-art
baselines.

本研究使用连续词袋模型和注意力机制以及加入时间信息的方法进行医疗代码嵌入，实验结果表明该方法明显优于五种现有的基准模型。