Manuel Amunategui

Manuel Amunategui

There are large amounts of insight and social discovery potential in mining crowd-sourced comments left on popular news forums like Reddit.com, Tumblr.com, Facebook.com and Hacker News. Unfortunately, due the overwhelming amount of participation with its varying quality of commentary, extracting value out of such data isn't always obvious nor timely. By designing efficient, single-pass and adaptive natural language filters to quickly prune spam, noise, copy-cats, marketing diversions, and out-of-context posts, we can remove over a third of entries and return the comments with a higher probability of relatedness to the original article in question. The approach presented here uses an adaptive, two-step filtering process. It first leverages the original article posted in the thread as a starting corpus to parse comments by matching intersecting words and term-ratio balance per sentence then grows the corpus by adding new words harvested from high-matching comments to increase filtering accuracy over time.

Manuel Amunategui, Tristan Markwell, Yelena Rozenfeld

word2vec affords a simple yet powerful approach of extracting quantitative variables from unstructured textual data. Over half of healthcare data is unstructured and therefore hard to model without involved expertise in data engineering and natural language processing. word2vec can serve as a bridge to quickly gather intelligence from such data sources. In this study, we ran 650 megabytes of unstructured, medical chart notes from the Providence Health & Services electronic medical record through word2vec. We used two different approaches in creating predictive variables and tested them on the risk of readmission for patients with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease). As a comparative benchmark, we ran the same test using the LACE risk model (a single score based on length of stay, acuity, comorbid conditions, and emergency department visits). Using only free text and mathematical might, we found word2vec comparable to LACE in predicting the risk of readmission of COPD patients.