Writing Guidelines


Reviewer Instructions are now available: Reviewer Instructions

Both full papers and extended abstracts should be blinded (no author information).

Full Paper

Excellent ML4H Proceedings papers should be compelling, cohesive works with a high degree of technical sophistication as well as clear and high-impact relevance to healthcare. Demonstrating each of these qualities in your work will be essential to acceptance. Full papers should abide by the NeurIPS dual submission policy.

Technical Sophistication

Technical sophistication is required for acceptance for an ML4H proceedings track paper. Merely applying well-established state-of-the-art techniques to a healthcare dataset and demonstrating good performance is insufficient. Although “technical sophistication” is a broad term, we highlight two critical aspects here: novelty and rigor.

An excellent ML4H proceedings paper will demonstrate novelty. Technical novelty comes in many forms, but some type of novelty or innovation in method design, construction, evaluation, or use is required.

Rigor is also critical for a high-quality ML4H paper. Rigor will mean different things for different works, but, largely, rigor implies that the conclusions presented are well supported by empirical evidence. Usually, this involves appropriate statistical techniques for model design and evaluation, including creating separate train, validation and completely held-out test sets. The paper should also investigate different configurations of the proposed system.

Relevance to Healthcare

Healthcare should be a main goal or application. Healthcare data and systems pose many unique challenges which often warrant novel techniques from machine learning or data science to address. An appreciation of these challenges and a focus on healthcare applications, even if actual deployment is not yet feasible, should be demonstrated in your paper.

Extended Abstract

An excellent extended abstract is one leads to insight at the workshop through interaction with other attendees. This can be through presenting new ideas/ways of thinking, leading to insightful discussion and feedback, dissemination new valuable resources, or enabling new opportunities for collaborations.

Extended abstract submissions should demonstrate that the work will yield such impact when presented at the workshop. Highlight opportunities for insightful discussion and demonstrate that your work will contribute to a creative, engaging, and constructive poster session. Reviewers will be explicitly asked to gauge how valuable they feel this work could be to other attendees of the workshop, as well as how valuable attending the workshop could be to the author of the abstract. This is not a license to submit low quality or barely begun work -- while these submissions may garner constructive comments during the review process, they will not likely generate useful discussions or insightful feedback during the workshop.