Methodological challenges and analytic opportunities for modeling and interpreting Big Healthcare Data

Abstract Managing, processing and understanding big healthcare data is challenging, costly and demanding. Without a robust fundamental theory for representation, analysis and inference, a roadmap for uniform handling and analyzing of such complex data remains elusive. In this article, we outline various big data challenges, opportunities, modeling methods and software techniques for blending complex healthcare data, advanced analytic tools, and distributed scientific computing. Using imaging, genetic and healthcare data we provide examples of processing heterogeneous datasets using distributed cloud services, automated and semi-automated classification techniques, and open-science protocols. Despite substantial advances, new innovative technologies need to be developed that enhance, scale and optimize the management and processing of large, complex and heterogeneous data. Stakeholder investments in data acquisition, research and development, computational infrastructure and education will be critical to realize the huge potential of big data, to reap the expected information benefits and to build lasting knowledge assets. Multi-faceted proprietary, open-source, and community developments will be essential to enable broad, reliable, sustainable and efficient data-driven discovery and analytics. Big data will affect every sector of the economy and their hallmark will be ‘team science’.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134522/1/13742_2016_Article_117.pd

An interactive human centered data science approach towards crime pattern analysis

The traditional machine learning systems lack a pathway for a human to integrate their domain knowledge into the underlying machine learning algorithms. The utilization of such systems, for domains where decisions can have serious consequences (e.g. medical decision-making and crime analysis), requires the incorporation of human experts' domain knowledge. The challenge, however, is how to effectively incorporate domain expert knowledge with machine learning algorithms to develop effective models for better decision making. In crime analysis, the key challenge is to identify plausible linkages in unstructured crime reports for the hypothesis formulation. Crime analysts painstakingly perform time-consuming searches of many different structured and unstructured databases to collate these associations without any proper visualization. To tackle these challenges and aiming towards facilitating the crime analysis, in this paper, we examine unstructured crime reports through text mining to extract plausible associations. Specifically, we present associative questioning based searching model to elicit multi-level associations among crime entities. We coupled this model with partition clustering to develop an interactive, human-assisted knowledge discovery and data mining scheme. The proposed human-centered knowledge discovery and data mining scheme for crime text mining is able to extract plausible associations between crimes, identifying crime pattern, grouping similar crimes, eliciting co-offender network and suspect list based on spatial-temporal and behavioral similarity. These similarities are quantified through calculating Cosine, Jacquard, and Euclidean distances. Additionally, each suspect is also ranked by a similarity score in the plausible suspect list. These associations are then visualized through creating a two-dimensional re-configurable crime cluster space along with a bipartite knowledge graph. This proposed scheme also inspects the grand challenge of integrating effective human interaction with the machine learning algorithms through a visualization feedback loop. It allows the analyst to feed his/her domain knowledge including choosing of similarity functions for identifying associations, dynamic feature selection for interactive clustering of crimes and assigning weights to each component of the crime pattern to rank suspects for an unsolved crime. We demonstrate the proposed scheme through a case study using the Anonymized burglary dataset. The scheme is found to facilitate human reasoning and analytic discourse for intelligence analysis