  In clinical data sets we often find static information (e.g. patient gender,
blood type, etc.) combined with sequences of data that are recorded during
multiple hospital visits (e.g. medications prescribed, tests performed, etc.).
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have proven to be very successful for
modelling sequences of data in many areas of Machine Learning. In this work we
present an approach based on RNNs, specifically designed for the clinical
domain, that combines static and dynamic information in order to predict future
events. We work with a database collected in the Charit\'{e} Hospital in Berlin
that contains complete information concerning patients that underwent a kidney
transplantation. After the transplantation three main endpoints can occur:
rejection of the kidney, loss of the kidney and death of the patient. Our goal
is to predict, based on information recorded in the Electronic Health Record of
each patient, whether any of those endpoints will occur within the next six or
twelve months after each visit to the clinic. We compared different types of
RNNs that we developed for this work, with a model based on a Feedforward
Neural Network and a Logistic Regression model. We found that the RNN that we
developed based on Gated Recurrent Units provides the best performance for this
task. We also used the same models for a second task, i.e., next event
prediction, and found that here the model based on a Feedforward Neural Network
outperformed the other models. Our hypothesis is that long-term dependencies
are not as relevant in this task.
