title: Sequence Mining of Comorbid Neurodevelopmental Disorders Using the SPADE Algorithm.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Understanding the progression of comorbid neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) during different critical time periods may contribute to our comprehension of the underlying pathophysiology of NDDs. The objective of our study was to identify frequent temporal sequences of developmental diagnoses in noisy patient data.
  
  
  METHODS
  We used a data set of 2810 patients, documenting NDD diagnoses given to them by an NDD expert at a child developmental center during multiple visits at different ages. Extensive preprocessing steps were developed in order to allow the data set to be processed by an efficient sequence mining algorithm (SPADE).
  
  
  RESULTS
  The discovered sequences were validated by cross validation for 10 iterations; all correlation coefficients for support, confidence and lift measures were above 0.75 and their proportions were similar. No signifi- cant differences between the distributions of sequences were found using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We have demonstrated the feasibility of using the SPADE algorithm for discovery of valid temporal sequences of comorbid disorders in children with NDDs. The identification of such sequences would be beneficial from clinical and research perspectives. Moreover, these sequences could serve as features for developing a full-fledged temporal predictive model.
authors: Inna
authors: I
authors: Pimus
authors: Mor Peleg, Ph.D., Assoc. Prof., Department of Information Systems, Rabin Building, room 7047, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, 3498838, E-mail: morpeleg@is.haifa.ac.il.
authors: Mor
authors: M
authors: Peleg
authors: Mitchell
authors: M
authors: Schertz
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000465:Algorithms; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D015897:Comorbidity; D057225:Data Mining; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D065886:Neurodevelopmental Disorders / Q000473:pathology*; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: SPADE; Sequence mining; comorbidity; neurodevelopmental disorders