In certain application areas when using predictive models, it is not enough to make an accurate prediction for an example, instead it might be more important to change a prediction from an undesired class into a desired class. In this paper we investigate methods for changing predictions of examples. To this end, we introduce a novel algorithm for changing predictions of examples and we compare this novel method to an existing method and a baseline method. In an empirical evaluation we compare the three methods on a total of 22 datasets. The results show that the novel method and the baseline method can change an example from an undesired class into a desired class in more cases than the competitor method (and in some cases this difference is statistically significant). We also show that the distance, as measured by the euclidean norm, is higher for the novel and baseline methods (and in some cases this difference is statistically significantly) than for state-of-the-art. The methods and their proposed changes are also evaluated subjectively in a medical domain with interesting results.

Electronic health records contain a wealth of epidemiological information about diseases at the population level. Using a database of medical diagnoses and drug prescriptions in electronic health records, we investigate the correlation between outdoor temperature and the incidence of epistaxis over time for two groups of patients. One group consists of patients that had been diagnosed with epistaxis and also been prescribed at least one of the three anti-thrombotic agents: Warfarin, Apixaban, or Rivaroxaban. The other group consists of patients that had been diagnosed with epistaxis and not been prescribed any of the three anti-thrombotic drugs. We find a strong negative correlation between the incidence of epistaxis and outdoor temperature for the group that had not been prescribed any of the three anti-thrombotic drugs, while there is a weaker correlation between incidence of epistaxis and outdoor temperature for the other group. It is, however, clear that both groups are affected in a similar way, such that the incidence of epistaxis increases with colder temperatures.

Random survival forests constitute a robust approach to survival modeling, i.e., predicting the probability that an event will occur before or on a given point in time. Similar to most standard predictive models, no guarantee for the prediction error is provided for this model, which instead typically is empirically evaluated. Conformal prediction is a rather recent framework, which allows the error of a model to be determined by a user specified confidence level, something which is achieved by considering set rather than point predictions. The framework, which has been applied to some of the most popular classification and regression techniques, is here for the first time applied to survival modeling, through random survival forests. An empirical investigation is presented where the technique is evaluated on datasets from two real-world applications; predicting component failure in trucks using operational data and predicting survival and treatment of heart failure patients from administrative healthcare data. The experimental results show that the error levels indeed are very close to the provided confidence levels, as guaranteed by the conformal prediction framework, and that the error for predicting each outcome, i.e., event or no-event, can be controlled separately. The latter may, however, lead to less informative predictions, i.e., larger prediction sets, in case the class distribution is heavily imbalanced.

Social networks contain implicit knowledge that can be used to infer hierarchical relations that are not explicitly present in the available data. Interaction patterns are typically affected by users' social relations. We present an approach to inferring such information that applies a link-analysis ranking algorithm at different levels of time granularity. In addition, a voting scheme is employed for obtaining the hierarchical relations. The approach is evaluated on two datasets: the Enron email data set, where the goal is to infer manager-subordinate relationships, and the Co-author data set, where the goal is to infer PhD advisor-advisee relations. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms more traditional approaches to inferring hierarchical relations from social networks.

We study the problem of mining ordered association rules from event sequences. Ordered association rules differ from regular association rules in that the events occurring in the antecedent (left hand side) of the rule are temporally constrained to occur strictly before the events in the consequent (right hand side). We argue that such constraints can provide more meaningful rules in particular application domains, such as health care. The importance and interestingness of the extracted rules are quantified by adapting existing rule mining metrics. Our experimental evaluation on real data sets demonstrates the descriptive power of ordered association rules against ordinary association rules.

Over the last decades the healthcare domain has seen a tremendous increase and interest in methods for making inference about patient care using large quantities of medical data. Such data is often stored in electronic health records and administrative health registries. As these data sources have grown increasingly complex, with millions of patients represented by thousands of attributes, static or time evolving, finding relevant and accurate patterns that can be used for predictive or descriptive modelling is impractical for human experts. In this paper, we concentrate our review on Swedish Administrative Health Registries (AHRs) and Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and provide an overview of recent and ongoing work in the area with focus on adverse drug events (ADEs) and heart failure.

Electronic health records contain large amounts of longitudinal data that are valuable for biomedical informatics research. The application of machine learning is a promising alternative to manual analysis of such data. However, the complex structure of the data, which includes clinical events that are unevenly distributed over time, poses a challenge for standard learning algorithms. Some approaches to modeling temporal data rely on extracting single values from time series; however, this leads to the loss of potentially valuable sequential information. How to better account for the temporality of clinical data, hence, remains an important research question. In this study, novel representations of temporal data in electronic health records are explored. These representations retain the sequential information, and are directly compatible with standard machine learning algorithms. The explored methods are based on symbolic sequence representations of time series data, which are utilized in a number of different ways. An empirical investigation, using 19 datasets comprising clinical measurements observed over time from a real database of electronic health records, shows that using a distance measure to random subsequences leads to substantial improvements in predictive performance compared to using the original sequences or clustering the sequences. Evidence is moreover provided on the quality of the symbolic sequence representation by comparing it to sequences that are generated using domain knowledge by clinical experts. The proposed method creates representations that better account for the temporality of clinical events, which is often key to prediction tasks in the biomedical domain.

Heart failure is a serious medical conditions involving decreased quality of life and an increased risk of premature death. A recent evaluation by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare shows that Swedish heart failure patients are often undertreated and do not receive basic medication as recommended by the national guidelines for treatment of heart failure. The objective of this paper is to use registry data to characterize groups of heart failure patients, with an emphasis on basic treatment. Towards this end, we explore the applicability of frequent itemset mining and disproportionality analysis for finding interesting and distinctive characterizations of a target group of patients, e.g., those who have received basic treatment, against a control group, e.g., those who have not received basic treatment. Our empirical evaluation is performed on data extracted from administrative health records from the Stockholm County covering the years 2010--2016. Our findings suggest that frequency is not always the most appropriate measure of importance for frequent itemsets, while itemset disproportionality against a control group provides alternative rankings of the extracted itemsets leading to some medically intuitive characterizations of the target groups.

An administrative health register containing health care data for over 2 million patients will be used to search for factors that can affect the treatment of heart failure. In the study, we will measure the effects of employed treatment for various groups of heart failure patients, using different measures of effectiveness. Significant deviations in effectiveness of treatments of the various patient groups will be reported and factors that may help explaining the effect of treatment will be analyzed. Identification of the most important factors that may help explain the observed deviations between the different groups will be derived through generation of predictive models, for which variable importance can be calculated. The findings may affect recommended treatments as well as high-lighting deviations from national guidelines.