title: Signal detection for vaccine side effects that have not been specified in advance.
abstract: An information-theoretic definition of similarity proposed by Dekang Lin in 1998 appears to have attractive properties for identifying medically similar cases in a large database. Examination of similar cases that appear following vaccination may provide a way of detecting previously unexpected associations. A key element here is the inclusion of shared time-since-vaccination as a dimension of similarity while considering concordance on many other features. The system is potentially much more sensitive to patterns with multiple features than are very large, high-dimension contingency tables.
authors.affiliation: World Health Information Science Consultants, LLC, Newton, MA, USA. Alec.Walker@WHISCON.com
authors.forename: Alexander M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Walker
mesh_terms: D016907:Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D007252:Influenza Vaccines / Q000009:adverse effects; D007257:Information Theory; D013997:Time Factors; D014611:Vaccination / Q000009:adverse effects; D014612:Vaccines / Q000009:adverse effects*
chemical_list: D007252:Influenza Vaccines; D014612:Vaccines