  We have two main contributions in this work: 1. We explore the usage of a
stacked denoising autoencoder, and a paragraph vector model to learn
task-independent dense patient representations directly from clinical notes. We
evaluate these representations by using them as features in multiple supervised
setups, and compare their performance with those of sparse representations. 2.
To understand and interpret the representations, we explore the best encoded
features within the patient representations obtained from the autoencoder
model. Further, we calculate the significance of the input features of the
trained classifiers when we use these pretrained representations as input.
