Integrating electronic health records (EHR) into machine learning-driven clinical research and hospital applications is important, as it harnesses extensive and high-quality patient data to enhance outcome predictions and treatment personalization. Nonetheless, due to privacy and security concerns, the secondary purpose of EHR data is consistently governed and regulated, primarily for research intentions, thereby constraining researchers' access to EHR data. Generating synthetic EHR data with deep learning methods is a viable and promising approach to mitigate privacy concerns, offering not only a supplementary resource for downstream applications but also sidestepping the confidentiality risks associated with real patient data. While prior efforts have concentrated on EHR data synthesis, significant challenges persist in the domain of generating synthetic EHR data: balancing the heterogeneity of real EHR including temporal and non-temporal features, addressing the missing values and irregular measures, and ensuring the privacy of the real data used for model training. Existing works in this domain only focused on solving one or two aforementioned challenges. In this work, we propose IGAMT, an innovative framework to generate privacy-preserved synthetic EHR data that not only maintain high quality with heterogeneous features, missing values, and irregular measures but also balances the privacy-utility trade-off. Extensive experiments prove that IGAMT significantly outperforms baseline architectures in terms of visual resemblance and comparable performance in downstream applications. Ablation case studies also prove the effectiveness of the techniques applied in IGAMT.

Predicting information cascades holds significant practical implications, including applications in public opinion analysis, rumor control, and product recommendation. Existing approaches have generally overlooked the significance of semantic topics in information cascades or disregarded the dissemination relations. Such models are inadequate in capturing the intricate diffusion process within an information network inundated with diverse topics. To address such problems, we propose a neural-based model using Topic-Aware Masked Attentive Network for Information Cascade Prediction (ICP-TMAN) to predict the next infected node of an information cascade. First, we encode the topical text into user representation to perceive the user-topic dependency. Next, we employ a masked attentive network to devise the diffusion context to capture the user-context dependency. Finally, we exploit a deep attention mechanism to model historical infected nodes for user embedding enhancement to capture user-history dependency. The results of extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of ICP-TMAN over existing state-of-the-art approaches.