PiRL: Participant-Invariant Representation Learning for Healthcare Using Maximum Mean Discrepancy and Triplet Loss

Due to individual heterogeneity, person-specific models are usually achieving better performance than generic (one-size-fits-all) models in data-driven health applications. However, generic models are usually preferable in real-world applications, due to the difficulties of developing person-specific models, such as new-user-adaptation issues and system complexities. To improve the performance of generic models, we propose a Participant-invariant Representation Learning (PiRL) framework, which utilizes maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss and domain-adversarial training to encourage the model to learn participant-invariant representations. Further, to avoid trivial solutions in the learned representations, a triplet loss based constraint is used for the model to learn the label-distinguishable embeddings. The proposed framework is evaluated on two public datasets (CLAS and Apnea-ECG), and significant performance improvements are achieved compared to the baseline models.

PiRL: Participant-Invariant Representation Learning for Healthcare

Due to individual heterogeneity, performance gaps are observed between generic (one-size-fits-all) models and person-specific models in data-driven health applications. However, in real-world applications, generic models are usually more favorable due to new-user-adaptation issues and system complexities, etc. To improve the performance of the generic model, we propose a representation learning framework that learns participant-invariant representations, named PiRL. The proposed framework utilizes maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) loss and domain-adversarial training to encourage the model to learn participant-invariant representations. Further, a triplet loss, which constrains the model for inter-class alignment of the representations, is utilized to optimize the learned representations for downstream health applications. We evaluated our frameworks on two public datasets related to physical and mental health, for detecting sleep apnea and stress, respectively. As preliminary results, we found the proposed approach shows around a 5% increase in accuracy compared to the baseline.