SUBIC: A Supervised Bi-Clustering Approach for Precision Medicine

Traditional medicine typically applies one-size-fits-all treatment for the entire patient population whereas precision medicine develops tailored treatment schemes for different patient subgroups. The fact that some factors may be more significant for a specific patient subgroup motivates clinicians and medical researchers to develop new approaches to subgroup detection and analysis, which is an effective strategy to personalize treatment. In this study, we propose a novel patient subgroup detection method, called Supervised Biclustring (SUBIC) using convex optimization and apply our approach to detect patient subgroups and prioritize risk factors for hypertension (HTN) in a vulnerable demographic subgroup (African-American). Our approach not only finds patient subgroups with guidance of a clinically relevant target variable but also identifies and prioritizes risk factors by pursuing sparsity of the input variables and encouraging similarity among the input variables and between the input and target variable

Cross-Linguistic Universals in Reading Acquisition with Applications to English-Language Learners with Reading Disabilities

There is a considerable gap in English reading achievement between English-language learners and native speakers in the United States. Differentiation of whether English language learners’ struggles are symptomatic of reading disability or related to second language acquisition is often challenging. These issues highlight the need for increased insight into reading development and disability in this population. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of cross-linguistic universals in reading acquisition, how reading disabilities manifest in various languages, and whether diagnostic and instructional approaches that are effective for native English speakers are also appropriate for English-language learners. Recommendations for assessment and intervention practices for at-risk and reading-disabled English-language learners are provided

A DMAIC integrated fuzzy FMEA model: A case study in the automotive industry

The growing competitiveness in the automotive industry and the strict standards to which it is subject, require high quality standards. For this, quality tools such as the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) are applied to quantify the risk of potential failure modes. However, for qualitative defects with subjectivity and associated uncertainty, and the lack of specialized technicians, it revealed the inefficiency of the visual inspection process, as well as the limitations of the FMEA that is applied to it. The fuzzy set theory allows dealing with the uncertainty and subjectivity of linguistic terms and, together with the expert systems, allows modeling of the knowledge involved in tasks that require human expertise. In response to the limitations of FMEA, a fuzzy FMEA system was proposed. Integrated in the design, measure, analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) cycle, the proposed system allows the representation of expert knowledge and improves the analysis of subjective failures, hardly detected by visual inspection, compared to FMEA. The fuzzy FMEA system was tested in a real case study at an industrial manufacturing unit. The identified potential failure modes were analyzed and a fuzzy risk priority number (RPN) resulted, which was compared with the classic RPN. The main results revealed several differences between both. The main differences between fuzzy FMEA and classical FMEA come from the non-linear relationship between the variables and in the attribution of an RPN classification that assigns linguistic terms to the results, thus allowing a strengthening of the decision-making regarding the mitigation actions of the most “important” failure modes.publishersversionpublishe

Applications of Data Mining in Healthcare

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)With increases in the quantity and quality of healthcare related data, data mining tools have the potential to improve people’s standard of living through personalized and predictive medicine. In this thesis we improve the state-of-the-art in data mining for several problems in the healthcare domain. In problems such as drug-drug interaction prediction and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) biomarkers discovery and prioritization, current methods either require tedious feature engineering or have unsatisfactory performance. New effective computational tools are needed that can tackle these complex problems. In this dissertation, we develop new algorithms for two healthcare problems: high-order drug-drug interaction prediction and amyloid imaging biomarker prioritization in Alzheimer’s Disease. Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and their associated adverse drug reactions (ADRs) represent a significant detriment to the public h ealth. Existing research on DDIs primarily focuses on pairwise DDI detection and prediction. Effective computational methods for high-order DDI prediction are desired. In this dissertation, I present a deep learning based model D 3 I for cardinality-invariant and order-invariant high-order DDI pre- diction. The proposed models achieve 0.740 F1 value and 0.847 AUC value on high-order DDI prediction, and outperform classical methods on order-2 DDI prediction. These results demonstrate the strong potential of D 3 I and deep learning based models in tackling the prediction problems of high-order DDIs and their induced ADRs. The second problem I consider in this thesis is amyloid imaging biomarkers discovery, for which I propose an innovative machine learning paradigm enabling precision medicine in this domain. The paradigm tailors the imaging biomarker discovery process to individual characteristics of a given patient. I implement this paradigm using a newly developed learning-to-rank method PLTR. The PLTR model seamlessly integrates two objectives for joint optimization: pushing up relevant biomarkers and ranking among relevant biomarkers. The empirical study of PLTR conducted on the ADNI data yields promising results to identify and prioritize individual-specific amyloid imaging biomarkers based on the individual’s structural MRI data. The resulting top ranked imaging biomarkers have the potential to aid personalized diagnosis and disease subtyping