Computationally Efficient Labeling of Cancer Related Forum Posts by Non-Clinical Text Information Retrieval

An abundance of information about cancer exists online, but categorizing and extracting useful information from it is difficult. Almost all research within healthcare data processing is concerned with formal clinical data, but there is valuable information in non-clinical data too. The present study combines methods within distributed computing, text retrieval, clustering, and classification into a coherent and computationally efficient system, that can clarify cancer patient trajectories based on non-clinical and freely available information. We produce a fully-functional prototype that can retrieve, cluster and present information about cancer trajectories from non-clinical forum posts. We evaluate three clustering algorithms (MR-DBSCAN, DBSCAN, and HDBSCAN) and compare them in terms of Adjusted Rand Index and total run time as a function of the number of posts retrieved and the neighborhood radius. Clustering results show that neighborhood radius has the most significant impact on clustering performance. For small values, the data set is split accordingly, but high values produce a large number of possible partitions and searching for the best partition is hereby time-consuming. With a proper estimated radius, MR-DBSCAN can cluster 50000 forum posts in 46.1 seconds, compared to DBSCAN (143.4) and HDBSCAN (282.3). We conduct an interview with the Danish Cancer Society and present our software prototype. The organization sees a potential in software that can democratize online information about cancer and foresee that such systems will be required in the future

Predicting Survival Time of Ball Bearings in the Presence of Censoring

Ball bearings find widespread use in various manufacturing and mechanical domains, and methods based on machine learning have been widely adopted in the field to monitor wear and spot defects before they lead to failures. Few studies, however, have addressed the problem of censored data, in which failure is not observed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predict the time to failure in ball bearings using survival analysis. First, we analyze bearing data in the frequency domain and annotate when a bearing fails by comparing the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the standard deviation between its break-in frequency bins and its break-out frequency bins. Second, we train several survival models to estimate the time to failure based on the annotated data and covariates extracted from the time domain, such as skewness, kurtosis and entropy. The models give a probabilistic prediction of risk over time and allow us to compare the survival function between groups of bearings. We demonstrate our approach on the XJTU and PRONOSTIA datasets. On XJTU, the best result is a 0.70 concordance-index and 0.21 integrated Brier score. On PRONOSTIA, the best is a 0.76 concordance-index and 0.19 integrated Brier score. Our work motivates further work on incorporating censored data in models for predictive maintenance.Comment: Accepted at AAAI Fall Symposium 2023 on Survival Predictio