Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / After the initial network is constructed using expert’s knowledge of the domain, Bayesian networks need to be updated as and when new data is observed. Literature mining is a very important source of this new data. In this work, we explore what kind of data needs to be extracted with the view to update Bayesian Networks, existing technologies which can be useful in achieving some of the goals and what research is required to accomplish the remaining requirements. This thesis specifically deals with utilizing causal associations and experimental results which can be obtained from literature mining. However, these associations and numerical results cannot be directly integrated with the Bayesian network. The source of the literature and the perceived quality of research needs to be factored into the process of integration, just like a human, reading the literature, would. This thesis presents a general methodology for updating a Bayesian Network with the mined data. This methodology consists of solutions to some of the issues surrounding the task of integrating the causal associations with the Bayesian Network and demonstrates the idea with a semiautomated software system.

Electronic medical record (EMR) data is collected on a daily basis at hospitals and other healthcare facilities to track patients’ health situations including conditions, treatments (medications, procedures), diagnostics (labs) and associated healthcare operations. Besides being useful for individual patient care and hospital operations (e.g., billing, triaging), EMRs can also be exploited for secondary data analyses to glean discriminative patterns that hold across patient cohorts for different phenotypes. These patterns in turn can yield high level insights into disease progression with interventional potential. In this dissertation, using a large scale realistic EMR dataset of over one million patients visiting University of Kentucky healthcare facilities, we explore data mining and machine learning methods for association rule (AR) mining and predictive modeling with mood and anxiety disorders as use-cases. Our first work involves analysis of existing quantitative measures of rule interestingness to assess how they align with a practicing psychiatrist’s sense of novelty/surprise corresponding to ARs identified from EMRs. Our second effort involves mining causal ARs with depression and anxiety disorders as target conditions through matching methods accounting for computationally identified confounding attributes. Our final effort involves efficient implementation (via GPUs) and application of contrast pattern mining to predictive modeling for mental conditions using various representational methods and recurrent neural networks. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of rule mining methods in secondary analyses of EMR data for identifying causal associations and building predictive models for diseases.