Explainable Antibiotics Prescriptions in NLP with Transformer Models

Abstract: The overprescription of antibiotics has resulted in bacteria resistance, which is considered a global threat to global health. Deciding if antibiotics should be prescribed or not from individual visits of patients’ medical records in Swedish can be considered a text classification task, one of the applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, medical experts and patients can not trust a model if explanations for its decision are not provided. In this work, multilingual and monolingual Transformer models are evaluated for the medical classification task. Furthermore, local explanations are obtained with SHapley Additive exPlanations and Integrated Gradients to compare the models’ predictions and evaluate the explainability methods. Finally, the local explanations are also aggregated to obtain global explanations and understand the features that contributed the most to the prediction of each class.