Machine learning for clinical time-series forecasting: an interview with Mayra Elwes

Summary

In a series of interviews, we’re meeting some of the PhD students that were selected to take part in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) . This time, we hear from Mayra Elwes about her work developing machine learning methods for clinical time-series data. Tell us a bit about your PhD – where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am a second-year computer science PhD student at the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University Hospital Cologne. My research focuses on the generalisation and domain adaptation of machine learning for clinical time-series forecasting, especially for clinic-to-clinic generalization scenarios. I am working on practical strategies to evaluate methods in a more contextualised way and on improving existing domain adaptation methods specific to time-series forecasting. Could you give us an overview of the research you’ve carried out during your PhD? One major challenge in medical AI is performance degradation when models are deployed in clinics not represented in their training data. This performance degradation often stems from differences in patient demographics, clinical practice, or measuring devices, and it manifests as data distribution shifts. I address this problem for a use-case from the intensive care unit: forecasting blood oxygenation levels and arterial mean blood pressure based on observed vital parameters to improve hypotension and hypoxemia prediction. Since this application task is not covered by standard AI benchmarks, my clinical collaborators and I designed a new benchmark. Currently, we are collecting data at University Hospital Cologne. Tools and datasets I built to benchmark generalization for this vital parameter forecasting task are available as open-source software： WavePrep , Algorithm2Domain , MIMIC-III Waveform Database Matched Subset . While building this benchmark, I developed a strategy to benchmark generalisation and domain adaptation approaches for application tasks and domains in a more contextualised way. By reporting the shift relevant to the downstream task alongside the performance degradation, results become comparable even on private datasets and between different application tasks. Is there an aspect of your research that has been pa…