Project summary

In clinical cohorts, for example with Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) patients, there are complex longitudinal patterns and sub-cohorts of patients for which comprehensive longitudinal characterization is available, and sub-cohorts where only limited information is available. We hypothesize that simplified helper models based on medically meaningful categorical representations of measurements can aid information transfer. In particular, we will investigate transfer from less well characterized sub-cohorts and medical expert knowledge into well-characterized sub-cohorts. Specifically, we will learn the much simpler joint distribution of the categorical data in a pre-training step, and subsequently train a model again at the level of the quantitative measurements. Such simpler distributions will also be used to formalize and incorporate medical expert knowledge.

Our methods

• Combining knowledge- and data-driven modeling
• Neural networks
• Pre-training