General Demographic Foundation Models for Enhancing Predictive Performance Across Diseases

Abstract: Demographic attributes are universally present in electronic health records and serve as vital predictors in clinical risk stratification and treatment decisions. Despite their significance, these attributes are often relegated to auxiliary roles in model design, with limited attention has been given to learning their representations. This study proposes a General Demographic Pre-trained (GDP) model as a foundational representation framework tailored to age and gender. The model is pre-trained and evaluated using datasets with diverse diseases and population compositions from different geographic regions. The GDP architecture explores combinations of ordering strategies and encoding methods to transform tabular demographic inputs into latent embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that sequential ordering substantially improves model performance in discrimination, calibration, and the corresponding information gain at each decision tree split, particularly in diseases where age and gender contribute significantly to risk stratification. Even in datasets where demographic attributes hold relatively low predictive value, GDP enhances the representational importance, increasing their influence in downstream gradient boosting models. The findings suggest that foundational models for tabular demographic attributes can generalize across tasks and populations, offering a promising direction for improving predictive performance in healthcare applications.