DearLLM: Enhancing Personalized Healthcare via Large Language Models-Deduced Feature Correlations

Abstract

Exploring the correlations between medical features is essential for extracting patient health patterns from electronic health records (EHR) data, and strengthening medical predictions and decision-making. To constrain the hypothesis space of pure data-driven deep learning in the context of limited annotated data, a common trend is to incorporate external knowledge, especially knowledge priors related to personalized health contexts, to optimize model training. However, most existing methods lack flexibility and are constrained by the uncertainties brought about by fixed feature correlation priors. In addition, in utilizing knowledge, these methods overlook the knowledge informative for personalized healthcare. To this end, we propose DearLLM, a novel and effective framework that leverages feature correlations deduced by large language models (LLMs) to enhance personalized healthcare. Concretely, DearLLM captures and learns quantitative correlations between medical features by calculating the conditional perplexity of LLMs’ deduction based on personalized patient backgrounds. Then, DearLLM enhances healthcare predictions by emphasizing knowledge that carries unique patient information through a feature-frequency-aware graph pooling method. Extensive experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets show significant performance gains brought by DearLLM. Furthermore, the discovered findings align well with medical literature, offering meaningful clinical interpretations.