  Machine learning approaches have been effective in predicting adverse
outcomes in different clinical settings. These models are often developed and
evaluated on datasets with heterogeneous patient populations. However, good
predictive performance on the aggregate population does not imply good
performance for specific groups.
  In this work, we present a two-step framework to 1) learn relevant patient
subgroups, and 2) predict an outcome for separate patient populations in a
multi-task framework, where each population is a separate task. We demonstrate
how to discover relevant groups in an unsupervised way with a
sequence-to-sequence autoencoder. We show that using these groups in a
multi-task framework leads to better predictive performance of in-hospital
mortality both across groups and overall. We also highlight the need for more
granular evaluation of performance when dealing with heterogeneous populations.
