Electronic health records provide a rich source of data for machine learning methods to learn dynamic treatment responses over time. However, any direct estimation is hampered by the presence of time-dependent confounding, where actions taken are dependent on time-varying variables related to the outcome of interest. Drawing inspiration from marginal structural models, a class of methods in epidemiology which use propensity weighting to adjust for time-dependent confounders, we introduce the Recurrent Marginal Structural Network - a sequence-to-sequence architecture for forecasting a patient's expected response to a series of planned treatments.

The authors rebuttal was very helpful and could clarify many questions. Especially, the novel contribution of learning a model for treatment effects over time made as improving our ratings. Treatment response forecasting always suffers from time-dependent confounders, making the exploration of causality very difficult. The standard approach to deal with this problem are Marginal Structural Models (MSM). However, these methods strongly rely on the accuracy of manual estimation steps.

Electronic health records provide a rich source of data for machine learning methods to learn dynamic treatment responses over time. However, any direct estimation is hampered by the presence of time-dependent confounding, where actions taken are dependent on time-varying variables related to the outcome of interest. Drawing inspiration from marginal structural models, a class of methods in epidemiology which use propensity weighting to adjust for time-dependent confounders, we introduce the Recurrent Marginal Structural Network - a sequence-to-sequence architecture for forecasting a patient's expected response to a series of planned treatments. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.