Interpretable estimation of the risk of heart failure hospitalization from a 30-second electrocardiogram

Survival modeling in healthcare relies on explainable statistical models; yet, their underlying assumptions are often simplistic and, thus, unrealistic. Machine learning models can estimate more complex relationships and lead to more accurate predictions, but are non-interpretable. This study shows it is possible to estimate hospitalization for congestive heart failure by a 30 seconds single-lead electrocardiogram signal. Using a machine learning approach not only results in greater predictive power but also provides clinically meaningful interpretations. We train an eXtreme Gradient Boosting accelerated failure time model and exploit SHapley Additive exPlanations values to explain the effect of each feature on predictions. Our model achieved a concordance index of 0.828 and an area under the curve of 0.853 at one year and 0.858 at two years on a held-out test set of 6,573 patients. These results show that a rapid test based on an electrocardiogram could be crucial in targeting and treating high-risk individuals.

A Trainable Reconciliation Method for Hierarchical Time-Series

In numerous applications, it is required to produce forecasts for multiple time-series at different hierarchy levels. An obvious example is given by the supply chain in which demand forecasting may be needed at a store, city, or country level. The independent forecasts typically do not add up properly because of the hierarchical constraints, so a reconciliation step is needed. In this paper, we propose a new general, flexible, and easy-to-implement reconciliation strategy based on an encoder-decoder neural network. By testing our method on four real-world datasets, we show that it can consistently reach or surpass the performance of existing methods in the reconciliation setting.