Interpretable Machine Learning for Personalized Medical Recommendations: A LIME-Based Approach

Chronic diseases are increasingly major threats to older persons, seriously affecting their physical health and well-being. Hospitals have accumulated a wealth of health-related data, including patients’ test reports, treatment histories, and diagnostic records, to better understand patients’ health, safety, and disease progression. Extracting relevant information from this data enables physicians to provide personalized patient-treatment recommendations. While collaborative filtering techniques and classical algorithms such as naive Bayes, logistic regression, and decision trees have had notable success in health-recommendation systems, most current systems primarily inform users of their likely preferences without providing explanations. This paper proposes an approach of deep learning with a local interpretable model–agnostic explanations (LIME)-based interpretable recommendation system to solve this problem. Specifically, we apply the proposed approach to two chronic diseases common in older adults: heart disease and diabetes. After data preprocessing, we use six deep-learning algorithms to form interpretations. In the heart-disease data set, the actual model recommendation of multi-layer perceptron and gradient-boosting algorithm differs from the local model’s recommendation of LIME, which can be used as its approximate prediction. From the feature importance of these two algorithms, it can be seen that the CholCheck, GenHith, and HighBP features are the most important for predicting heart disease. In the diabetes data set, the actual model predictions of the multi-layer perceptron and logistic-regression algorithm were little different from the local model’s prediction of LIME, which can be used as its approximate recommendation. Moreover, from the feature importance of the two algorithms, it can be seen that the three features of glucose, BMI, and age were the most important for predicting heart disease. Next, LIME is used to determine the importance of each feature that affected the results of the calculated model. Subsequently, we present the contribution coefficients of these features to the final recommendation. By analyzing the impact of different patient characteristics on the recommendations, our proposed system elucidates the underlying reasons behind these recommendations and enhances patient trust. This approach has important implications for medical recommendation systems and encourages informed decision-making in healthcare.