DeltaSHAP: Explaining Prediction Evolutions in Online Patient Monitoring with Shapley Values

This study proposes DeltaSHAP, a novel explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) algorithm specifically designed for online patient monitoring systems. In clinical settings, discovering the causes driving patient risk evolution is critical for timely intervention, yet existing XAI methods fail to address the unique requirements of clinical time series prediction tasks. To this end, DeltaSHAP addresses three key clinical needs: explaining the changes in the consecutive predictions rather than the prediction score itself, providing both magnitude and direction of feature attributions, and delivering these insights in real time. By adapting Shapley values to temporal settings, our approach accurately captures feature coalition effects. Unlike existing methods that rely on computationally expensive generative models, DeltaSHAP efficiently processes only observed variable combinations, making it suitable for time-sensitive clinical applications. We also introduce new evaluation metrics to evaluate the faithfulness of the attributions for online time series, and demonstrate through experiments on online patient monitoring tasks that DeltaSHAP outperforms state-of-the-art XAI methods in both explanation quality as 62% and computational efficiency as 33% time reduction on the MIMIC-III decompensation prediction task. We release our code at https://anonymous.4open.science/status/DeltaSHAP.