Capture Timing-Attention of Events in Clinical Time Series
arXiv:2602.10385v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatically discovering personalized trajectories (i.e., sequential event patterns) from longitudinal EHR data is crucial for enabling precision medicine in clinical research, yet it remains a formidable challenge even for contemporary AI models. For example, while the attention mechanism of transformers can capture rich associations, it is largely agnostic to event timing and ordering, thereby bypassing potential causal reasoning. Intuitively, we need a method capable of evaluating the ``degree of alignment'' among patient-specific trajectories and identifying their shared patterns, that is, the significant events in a consistent sequence. This necessitates treating timing as a true **computable** dimension, allowing models to assign ``relative timestamps'' to candidate events beyond their observed physical times. In this work, we introduce LITT (Individual-Level Time Transformation), a novel architecture that enables tempora