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Learning temporal weights of clinical events using variable importance

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, July 2016
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Title
Learning temporal weights of clinical events using variable importance
Published in
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, July 2016
DOI 10.1186/s12911-016-0311-6
Pubmed ID
Authors

Jing Zhao, Aron Henriksson

Abstract

Longitudinal data sources, such as electronic health records (EHRs), are very valuable for monitoring adverse drug events (ADEs). However, ADEs are heavily under-reported in EHRs. Using machine learning algorithms to automatically detect patients that should have had ADEs reported in their health records is an efficient and effective solution. One of the challenges to that end is how to take into account the temporality of clinical events, which are time stamped in EHRs, and providing these as features for machine learning algorithms to exploit. Previous research on this topic suggests that representing EHR data as a bag of temporally weighted clinical events is promising; however, the weights were in that case pre-assigned according to their time stamps, which is limited and potentially less accurate. This study therefore focuses on how to learn weights that effectively take into account the temporality and importance of clinical events for ADE detection. Variable importance obtained from the random forest learning algorithm is used for extracting temporal weights. Two strategies are proposed for applying the learned weights: weighted aggregation and weighted sampling. The first strategy aggregates the weighted clinical events from different time windows to form new features; the second strategy retains the original features but samples them by using their weights as probabilities when building each tree in the forest. The predictive performance of random forest models using the learned weights with the two strategies is compared to using pre-assigned weights. In addition, to assess the sensitivity of the weight-learning procedure, weights from different granularity levels are evaluated and compared. In the weighted sampling strategy, using learned weights significantly improves the predictive performance, in comparison to using pre-assigned weights; however, there is no significant difference between them in the weighted aggregation strategy. Moreover, the granularity of the weight learning procedure has a significant impact on the former, but not on the latter. Learning temporal weights is significantly beneficial in terms of predictive performance with the weighted sampling strategy. Moreover, weighted aggregation generally diminishes the impact of temporal weighting of the clinical events, irrespective of whether the weights are pre-assigned or learned.

Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 45 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 45 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 11 24%
Researcher 8 18%
Student > Ph. D. Student 5 11%
Student > Bachelor 4 9%
Other 3 7%
Other 8 18%
Unknown 6 13%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 9 20%
Computer Science 5 11%
Nursing and Health Professions 4 9%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 2 4%
Earth and Planetary Sciences 2 4%
Other 12 27%
Unknown 11 24%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 17 May 2022.
All research outputs
#7,496,019
of 22,914,829 outputs
Outputs from BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
#766
of 1,997 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#128,500
of 364,499 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
#19
of 41 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,914,829 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 44th percentile – i.e., 44% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,997 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.9. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 58% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 364,499 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 49th percentile – i.e., 49% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 41 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 48th percentile – i.e., 48% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.