Patient-Specific Effects of Medication Using Latent Force Models with Gaussian Processes

A multi-output Gaussian process (GP) is a flexible Bayesian nonparametric framework that has proven useful in jointly modeling the physiological states of patients in medical time series data. However, capturing the short-term effects of drugs and therapeutic interventions on patient physiological state remains challenging. We propose a novel approach that models the effect of interventions as a hybrid Gaussian process composed of a GP capturing patient baseline physiology convolved with a latent force model capturing effects of treatments on specific physiological features. The combination of a multi-output GP with a time-marked kernel GP leads to a well-characterized model of patients' physiological state across a hospital stay, including response to interventions. Our model leads to analytically tractable cross-covariance functions that allow for scalable inference. Our hierarchical model includes estimates of patient-specific effects but allows sharing of support across patients. Our approach achieves competitive predictive performance on challenging hospital data, where we recover patient-specific response to the administration of three common drugs: one antihypertensive drug and two anticoagulants.