Nonstationary Multivariate Gaussian Processes for Electronic Health Records

Abstract

We propose multivariate nonstationary Gaussian processes for jointly modeling multiple clinical variables, where the key parameters, length-scales, standard deviations and the correlations between the observed output, are all time dependent. We perform posterior inference via Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). We also provide methods for obtaining computationally efficient gradient-based maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates. We validate our model on synthetic data as well as on electronic health records (EHR) data from Kaiser Permanente (KP). We show that the proposed model provides better predictive performance over a stationary model as well as uncovers interesting latent correlation processes across vitals which are potentially predictive of patient risk.