AgeTopicModels: Inferring Age-Dependent Disease Topic from Diagnosis Data

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Abstract
We propose an age-dependent topic modelling (ATM) model, providing a low-rank representation of longitudinal records of hundreds of distinct diseases in large electronic health record data sets. The model assigns to each individual topic weights for several disease topics; each disease topic reflects a set of diseases that tend to co-occur as a function of age, quantified by age-dependent topic loadings for each disease. The model assumes that for each disease diagnosis, a topic is sampled based on the individual’s topic weights (which sum to 1 across topics, for a given individual), and a disease is sampled based on the individual’s age and the age-dependent topic loadings (which sum to 1 across diseases, for a given topic at a given age). The model generalises the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model by allowing topic loadings for each topic to vary with age. References: Jiang (2023) .