25,854 research outputs found
Prediction of future hospital admissions - what is the tradeoff between specificity and accuracy?
Large amounts of electronic medical records collected by hospitals across the
developed world offer unprecedented possibilities for knowledge discovery using
computer based data mining and machine learning. Notwithstanding significant
research efforts, the use of this data in the prediction of disease development
has largely been disappointing. In this paper we examine in detail a recently
proposed method which has in preliminary experiments demonstrated highly
promising results on real-world data. We scrutinize the authors' claims that
the proposed model is scalable and investigate whether the tradeoff between
prediction specificity (i.e. the ability of the model to predict a wide number
of different ailments) and accuracy (i.e. the ability of the model to make the
correct prediction) is practically viable. Our experiments conducted on a data
corpus of nearly 3,000,000 admissions support the authors' expectations and
demonstrate that the high prediction accuracy is maintained well even when the
number of admission types explicitly included in the model is increased to
account for 98% of all admissions in the corpus. Thus several promising
directions for future work are highlighted.Comment: In Proc. International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational
Biology, April 201
DCU@TRECMed 2012: Using ad-hoc baselines for domain-specific retrieval
This paper describes the first participation of DCU in the TREC Medical Records Track (TRECMed). We performed some initial experiments on the 2011 TRECMed data based on the BM25 retrieval model. Surprisingly, we found that the standard BM25 model with default parameters, performs comparable to the best automatic runs submitted to TRECMed 2011 and would have resulted in rank four out of 29 participating groups. We expected that some form of domain adaptation would increase performance. However, results on the 2011 data proved otherwise: concept-based query expansion decreased performance, and filtering and reranking by term proximity also decreased performance slightly. We submitted four runs based on the BM25 retrieval model to TRECMed 2012 using standard BM25, standard query expansion, result filtering, and concept-based query expansion. Official results for 2012 confirm that domain-specific knowledge does not increase performance compared to the BM25 baseline as applied by us
Searching Data: A Review of Observational Data Retrieval Practices in Selected Disciplines
A cross-disciplinary examination of the user behaviours involved in seeking
and evaluating data is surprisingly absent from the research data discussion.
This review explores the data retrieval literature to identify commonalities in
how users search for and evaluate observational research data. Two analytical
frameworks rooted in information retrieval and science technology studies are
used to identify key similarities in practices as a first step toward
developing a model describing data retrieval
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