RISE Seminar: 11/16/18 Diversity-promoting and large-scale machine learning for healthcare, a talk by Pengtao Xie

November 16, 2018

Title:                 Diversity-promoting and large-scale machine learning for healthcare

Speaker:           Pengtao Xie

Affiliation:         Petuum

Date and location: Friday, November 16, 12:30 – 1:30 pm; Wozniak Lounge (430 Soda Hall)

Abstract:

In healthcare, a tsunami of medical data has emerged, including electronic health records, images, literature, etc. These data can be heterogeneous and noisy, which renders clinical decision-making time-consuming, error-prone and suboptimal. In this thesis, we develop machine learning (ML) models and systems for distilling high-value patterns from unstructured clinical data and making informed and real-time medical predictions and recommendations, to aid physicians in improving the efficiency of workflow and quality of patient care. When developing these models, we encounter several challenges: (1) How to better capture infrequent clinical patterns, such as rare subtypes of diseases; (2) How to make the models generalize well on unseen patients? (3) How to promote the interpretability of the decisions? (4) How to improve the timeliness of decision-making without sacrificing its quality? (5) How to efficiently discover massive clinical patterns from large-scale data?

To address challenges (1-4), we systematically study diversity-promoting learning, which encourages the components in ML models (1) to diversely spread out to give infrequent patterns a broader coverage, (2) to be imposed with structured constraints for better generalization performance, (3) to be mutually complementary for more compact representation of information, and (4) to be less redundant for better interpretation. The study is performed in the context of both frequentist statistics and Bayesian statistics. In the former, we develop diversity-promoting regularizers that are empirically effective, theoretically analyzable and computationally efficient. In the latter, we develop Bayesian priors that effectively entail an inductive bias of “diversity” among a finite or infinite number of components and facilitate the development of efficient posterior inference algorithms. To address challenge (5), we study large-scale learning. Specifically, we design efficient distributed ML systems by exploiting a system-algorithm co-design approach. Inspired by a sufficient factor property of many ML models, we design a peer-to-peer system — Orpheus — that significantly reduces communication and fault tolerance costs.

We apply the proposed diversity-promoting learning (DPL) techniques and distributed ML systems to address several critical issues in healthcare, including discharge medication prediction, automatic ICD code filling, automatic generalization of medical-imaging reports, similar-patient retrieval, hierarchical multi-label tagging of medical images, and large-scale medical-topic discovery. Evaluations on various clinical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the DPL methods and efficiency of the Orpheus system.

Bio:

Pengtao Xie is a research scientist at Petuum Inc, leading the research and product development in machine learning for multiple vertical domains, including healthcare, manufacturing, and finance. In his PhD study in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, he worked on latent space models and distributed machine learning, with application to clinical decision-makings. He published about thirty papers at top-tiered machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and data mining conferences including ICML, JMLR, ACL, ICCV, KDD, UAI, IJCAI, AAAI, and serve as program committee members or reviewers for about twenty renowned conferences and journals. He won the 2018 Innovator Award presented by the Pittsburgh Business Times. He was recognized as a Siebel Scholar and was a recipient of the Goldman Sachs Global Leader Scholarship and the National Scholarship of China. He received MS degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Tsinghua University and BS from Sichuan University.