A tutorial on discovering and quantifying the effect of latent causal sources of multimodal EHR data

Abstract

We provide an accessible description of a peer-reviewed generalizable causal machine learning pipeline to (i) discover latent causal sources of large-scale electronic health records observations, and (ii) quantify the source causal effects on clinical outcomes. We illustrate how imperfect multimodal clinical data can be processed, decomposed into probabilistic independent latent sources, and used to train taskspecific causal models from which individual causal effects can be estimated. We summarize the findings of the two real-world applications of the approach to date as a demonstration of its versatility and utility for medical discovery at scale.