Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This paper introduces a logic-based framework for inferring high-level, temporally extended events from timestamped data using logical rules to define event existence and termination conditions. The framework incorporates constraints to resolve inconsistencies arising from potentially incorrect event inferences, employing a repair mechanism to select consistent event sets. By identifying restrictions that ensure polynomial-time data complexity, the authors demonstrate the feasibility of their approach and validate its applicability in a lung cancer use case, showing alignment with medical expert opinions.
A novel logic-based approach makes inferring complex, temporally-extended events from timestamped data tractable, even in the messy real-world of medical records.
In this paper, we develop a novel logic-based approach to detecting high-level temporally extended events from timestamped data and background knowledge. Our framework employs logical rules to capture existence and termination conditions for simple temporal events and to combine these into meta-events. In the medical domain, for example, disease episodes and therapies are inferred from timestamped clinical observations, such as diagnoses and drug administrations stored in patient records, and can be further combined into higher-level disease events. As some incorrect events might be inferred, we use constraints to identify incompatible combinations of events and propose a repair mechanism to select preferred consistent sets of events. While reasoning in the full framework is intractable, we identify relevant restrictions that ensure polynomial-time data complexity. Our prototype system implements core components of the approach using answer set programming. An evaluation on a lung cancer use case supports the interest of the approach, both in terms of computational feasibility and positive alignment of our results with medical expert opinions. While strongly motivated by the needs of the healthcare domain, our framework is purposely generic, enabling its reuse in other areas.