MERITS: Medication Recommendation for Chronic Disease with Irregular Time-Series

Medication recommendation for chronic diseases based on the complex historical electronic medical records (EMR) is an important and challenging research problem in medical informatics because the medical records are often irregularly sampled and contain many missing data. However, most existing approaches fail to explore the irregular time-series dependencies and ignore the consecutive correlation in dynamic prescription history. To fill this gap, we propose the MEdication Recommendation network on Irregular Time-Series (MERITS), which captures the irregular time-series dependencies with the neural ordinary differential equations (Neural ODE). Meanwhile, it leverages a drug-drug interaction knowledge graph and two learned medication relation graphs to explore the co-occurrence and sequential correlations of the medications. We further propose an attention-based encoder-decoder framework to combine the historical information of patients and medications from EMR. Besides, we collect and annotate a diabetes inpatient medication dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of MERITS by comparing it with several state-of-the-art methods of medication recommendations.