A-GSTCN: An Augmented Graph Structural–Temporal Convolution Network for Medication Recommendation Based on Electronic Health Records

Medication recommendation based on electronic health records (EHRs) is a significant research direction in the biomedical field, which aims to provide a reasonable prescription for patients according to their historical and current health conditions. However, the existing recommended methods have many limitations in dealing with the structural and temporal characteristics of EHRs. These methods either only consider the current state while ignoring the historical situation, or fail to adequately assess the structural correlations among various medical events. These factors result in poor recommendation quality. To solve this problem, we propose an augmented graph structural–temporal convolutional network (A-GSTCN). Firstly, an augmented graph attention network is used to model the structural features among medical events of patients’ EHRs. Next, the dilated convolution combined with residual connection is applied in the proposed model, which can improve the temporal prediction capability and further reduce the complexity. Moreover, the cache memory module further enhances the model’s learning of the history of EHRs. Finally, the A-GSTCN model is compared with the baselines through experiments, and the efficiency of the A-GSTCN model is verified by Jaccard, F1 and PRAUC. Not only that, the proposed model also reduces the training parameters by an order of magnitude.