A Temporal Mining Framework for Classifying Un-Evenly Spaced Clinical Data: An Approach for Building Effective Clinical Decision-Making System

Appl Clin Inform. 2016 Jan 13;7(1):1-21. doi: 10.4338/ACI-2015-08-RA-0102. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Background: Clinical time-series data acquired from electronic health records (EHR) are liable to temporal complexities such as irregular observations, missing values and time constrained attributes that make the knowledge discovery process challenging.

Objective: This paper presents a temporal rough set induced neuro-fuzzy (TRiNF) mining framework that handles these complexities and builds an effective clinical decision-making system. TRiNF provides two functionalities namely temporal data acquisition (TDA) and temporal classification.

Method: In TDA, a time-series forecasting model is constructed by adopting an improved double exponential smoothing method. The forecasting model is used in missing value imputation and temporal pattern extraction. The relevant attributes are selected using a temporal pattern based rough set approach. In temporal classification, a classification model is built with the selected attributes using a temporal pattern induced neuro-fuzzy classifier.

Result: For experimentation, this work uses two clinical time series dataset of hepatitis and thrombosis patients. The experimental result shows that with the proposed TRiNF framework, there is a significant reduction in the error rate, thereby obtaining the classification accuracy on an average of 92.59% for hepatitis and 91.69% for thrombosis dataset.

Conclusion: The obtained classification results prove the efficiency of the proposed framework in terms of its improved classification accuracy.

Keywords: Clinical time-series data; neuro-fuzzy; rough set; temporal data acquisition; temporal mining.

MeSH terms

  • Clinical Decision-Making / methods*
  • Data Mining / methods*
  • Electronic Health Records
  • Fuzzy Logic
  • Hepatitis / diagnosis
  • Humans
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Thrombosis / diagnosis
  • Time Factors