Multi-Feature Map Integrated Attention Model for Early Prediction of Type 2 Diabetes Using Irregular Health Examination Records.

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a worldwide chronic disease that is difficult to cure and causes a heavy social burden. Early prediction of T2D can effectively identify high-risk populations and facilitate earlier implementation of appropriate preventive interventions. Various early prediction models for T2D have been proposed. However, these methods do not consider the following factors: 1) health examination records (HER) containing health information before diagnosis; 2) rating information containing clinical knowledge; and 3) local and global information of time-series features. These diagnostically relevant factors need to be considered. It is challenging due to irregular and multivariate time series. In this paper, we propose the multi-feature map integrated attention model (MFMAM) for early diabetes prediction using HER. Specifically, HER is converted into the multi-feature map to capture local and global volatility, as well as the sequence order of high-dimensional features. We concatenate rating indicators to introduce clinical knowledge. In addition, considering missing and temporal patterns, we utilize missing and time embedding to learn the complex transition of health status. We adopt attention mechanisms to capture essential features (channels) and time points (spatial). To evaluate the proposed model, we conducted experiments on real-world long-term HER. The results demonstrated that MFMAM outperformed baseline models on tasks of varying sequence lengths and prediction windows. Moreover, we applied our designs to baseline models, and their performance was considerably improved. The proposed model contributes to the short-term and long-term early prediction of T2D in individuals with varying information richness.