Adverse drug events (ADEs) as well as other preventable adverse events in the hospital setting incur a yearly monetary cost of approximately $3.5 billion, in the United States alone. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to reduce the impact and prevalence of ADEs within the healthcare sector, not only since it will result in reducing human suffering, but also as a means to substantially reduce economical strains on the healthcare system. One approach to mitigate this problem is to employ predictive models. While existing methods have been focusing on the exploitation of static features, limited attention has been given to temporal features. In this paper, we present a novel classification framework for detecting ADEs in complex Electronic health records (EHRs) by exploiting the temporality and sparsity of the underlying features. The proposed framework consists of three phases for transforming sparse and multi-variate time series features into a single-valued feature representation, which can then be used by any classifier. Moreover, we propose and evaluate three different strategies for leveraging feature sparsity by incorporating it into the new representation. A large-scale evaluation on 15 ADE datasets extracted from a real-world EHR system shows that the proposed framework achieves significantly improved predictive performance compared to state-of-the-art. Moreover, our framework can reveal features that are clinically consistent with medical findings on ADE detection. Our study and experimental findings demonstrate that temporal multi-variate features of variable length and with high sparsity can be effectively utilized to predict ADEs from EHRs. Two key advantages of our framework are that it is method agnostic, i.e., versatile, and of low computational cost, i.e., fast; hence providing an important building block for future exploitation within the domain of machine learning from EHRs.

Time series classification has received great attention over the past decade with a wide range of methods focusing on predictive performance by exploiting various types of temporal features. Nonetheless, little emphasis has been placed on interpretability and explainability. In this paper, we formulate the novel problem of explainable time series tweaking, where, given a time series and an opaque classifier that provides a particular classification decision for the time series, we want to find the changes to be performed to the given time series so that the classifier changes its decision to another class. We show that the problem is \({\mathbf {NP}}\)-hard, and focus on three instantiations of the problem using global and local transformations. In the former case, we investigate the k-nearest neighbor classifier and provide an algorithmic solution to the global time series tweaking problem. In the latter case, we investigate the random shapelet forest classifier and focus on two instantiations of the local time series tweaking problem, which we refer to as reversible and irreversible time series tweaking, and propose two algorithmic solutions for the two problems along with simple optimizations. An extensive experimental evaluation on a variety of real datasets demonstrates the usefulness and effectiveness of our problem formulation and solutions.

In this paper, we study the problem of classification of sequences of temporal intervals. Our main contribution is a novel framework, which we call , for extracting relevant features from interval sequences to construct classifiers. introduces the notion of utilizing random temporal abstraction features, we define as , as a means to capture information pertaining to class-discriminatory events which occur across the span of complete interval sequences. Our empirical evaluation is applied to a wide array of benchmark data sets and fourteen novel datasets for adverse drug event detection. We demonstrate how the introduction of simple sequential features, followed by progressively more complex features each improve classification performance. Importantly, this investigation demonstrates that significantly improves AUC performance over the current state-of-the-art. The investigation also reveals that the selection of underlying classification algorithm is important to achieve superior predictive performance, and how the number of features influences the performance of our framework.