=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1953/healthRecSys17_paper_10 |storemode=property |title=Neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering for Therapy Decision Support |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1953/healthRecSys17_paper_10.pdf |volume=Vol-1953 |authors=Felix Gräßer,Stefanie Beckert,Denise Küster,Susanne Abraham,Hagen Malberg,Jochen Schmitt,Sebastian Zaunseder |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/recsys/GrasserBKAMSZ17 }} ==Neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering for Therapy Decision Support== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1953/healthRecSys17_paper_10.pdf
          Neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering for Therapy
                           Decision Support
      Felix Gräßer, Hagen Malberg                               Stefanie Beckert, Denise                               Susanne Abraham
        and Sebastian Zaunseder                                Küster and Jochen Schmitt                          Klinik und Poliklinik für
     Institut für Biomedizinische Technik                        Zentrum für Evidenzbasierte                  Dermatologie Universitätsklinikum
       Technische Universität Dresden                              Gesundheitsversorgung                                  Dresden
               Dresden, Germany                                  Universitätsklinikum Dresden                        Dresden, Germany
         felix.graesser@tu-dresden.de                                 Dresden, Germany                              susanne.abraham@
                                                                       jochen.schmitt@                            uniklinikum-dresden.de
                                                                   uniklinikum-dresden.de
ABSTRACT                                                                             ACM Reference Format:
Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) providing assistance for                    Felix Gräßer, Stefanie Beckert, Denise Küster, Susanne Abraham, Hagen
                                                                                     Malberg, Jochen Schmitt and Sebastian Zaunseder. 2017. Neighborhood-
diagnosis and treatment decisions are expected to play an increas-
                                                                                     based Collaborative Filtering for Therapy Decision Support. In Proceedings
ingly important role in future healthcare. Especially data-driven                    of the Second International Workshop on Health Recommender Systems co-
approaches employing data mining and machine learning tech-                          located with ACM RecSys 2017, Como, Italy, August 2017 (RecSys’17), 5 pages.
niques to exploit the large volume of daily captured clinical data
promise to open up new perspectives. Particularly in e-commerce
Recommender Systems (RSs) have evolved considerably over the
                                                                                     1    INTRODUCTION
last years, yielding extremely sophisticated and specialized meth-
ods. In healthcare, however, such algorithms have not found wide                     Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) aim to assist health profes-
application although offering wide opportunities. Within this work                   sionals with the clinical decision-making tasks. Providing diagnosis
the idea of RSs, namely neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering                   or treatment recommendations can foster personalization and con-
(CF), is transferred to the domain of CDSS aiming at helping to find                 tribute to improve quality and efficiency of patient care. CDSS
an optimal personalized therapy for a given patient and time, i.e.                   approaches are typically distinguished between data-driven and
consultation under consideration. Particular focus of this work is to                knowledge-based approaches.
adapt neighborhood-based CF methods to exploit high-dimensional                      Knowledge-based systems rely on rule-based expert knowledge
clinical data. To leverage trust and reduce risk of the proposed                     only. Implementing and updating of such manually encoded evidence-
system, an exclusively data-driven approach is extended by a set                     based guidelines, however, puts a challenging bottleneck on providers
of evidence-based contraindication rules excluding inappropriate                     of CDSS. Furthermore, individual patients’ characteristics com-
therapies from the recommendation list. The proposed therapy                         monly differ from the strict inclusion criteria on which evidence is
recommendation system is practically evaluated on an exemplary                       based on, i.e. a clinical study was conducted on, which may result
clinical dataset. Its underlying conceptual framework, however, is                   in differing therapy responses. Thus, a patient-specific treatment,
intended to be transferable to other diseases and medical disciplines.               i.e. an individually optimal therapy option cannot be provided on
                                                                                     the basis of guidelines derived from clinical studies only.
                                                                                     Data-driven CDSS, on the other hand, are supposed to automati-
CCS CONCEPTS                                                                         cally extract information from clinical data and facilitate automatic
• Information systems → Expert systems; • Applied comput-                            adaptability to evolving databases. In this way, data-driven CDSS
ing → Health care information systems; Health informatics;                           are expected to be capable of exploiting the collective clinical expe-
• Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social com-                           rience represented by large-scale databases to improve quality and
puting theory, concepts and paradigms;                                               increase personalization level of automatically generated therapy
                                                                                     recommendations. Thus, data-driven CDSS are a promising alter-
KEYWORDS                                                                             native and are expected to open up new perspectives in medicine.
                                                                                     However, clinical data is often characterized by uncertainties and
Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS), Health Recommender
                                                                                     incompleteness (sparsity), high dimensionality and complex inter-
System, Therapy Recommender System, Collaborative Filtering,
                                                                                     dependencies [23][1], which places high demands on applicable
Recommender System Evaluation
                                                                                     methods. Traditional methods from machine learning, i.e. artificial
                                                                                     neural network classifier (ANN) or complex classifier ensembles
                                                                                     have proven to be very effective in learning patterns from large-
Second International Workshop on Health Recommender Systems co-located with ACM      scale databases. However, the stated properties of medical data
RecSys 2017, August 2017, Como, Italy                                                make the application of such algorithms challenging. Moreover, an
© 2017. Copyright for the individual papers remains with the authors. Copying per-   essential requirement for acceptance of data-driven CDSS among
mitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted
by its editors.                                                                      health professionals are interpretabilty and comprehensibility of
                                                                                     the produced results. The blackbox-behaviour of typical machine
HealthRecSys’17, August 2017, Como, Italy                                                                                      F. Gräßer et al.


learning methods restricts insight into the classification process.      idea of using CF for therapy decision support are a nursing care
This can be assumed to be one key factor hindering a wider spread        plan recommender [5] and an approach recommending wellness
of data-mining and machine learning applications in the context of       treatment [14].
CDSS to date.
Particularly in e-commerce applications, Recommender Systems             3     METHODOLOGY AND EVALUATION
(RSs), namely neighbourhood-based approaches as Collaborative            Within this work, we propose and evaluate an exemplary therapy
Filtering (CF) algorithms, have gained increasing popularity within      decision support system targeting therapy recommendations for
the preceding years. In this context, RSs support customers to in-       patients suffering from the autoimmune skin disease psoriasis. The
dividually identify most interesting products from a wide range          developed therapy decision support system aims at recommending
of possible options by predicting a user’s preference for products       the potentially most effective systemic therapy out of M = 21
very effectively[20]. Incorporating only a modest number of near-        therapy options for a given patient and consultation.
est neighbors into the computation can provide transparency on
the process of recommendation generation. Additionally, by ap-           3.1    Data Characteristics
plying a suitable similarity metric, such algorithms can cope with
heterogeneity and sparsity. Therefore, to address both, challenges       The exemplary data at hand comprises excerpts from health records
related to the data characteristics and comprehensibility issue, we      that were collected in the Clinic and Polyclinic for Dermatology,
proposed transferring the idea of CF algorithms into the domain          University Hospital Dresden. The collected database comprises
of CDSS [9]. The overall objective of the proposed therapy recom-        1111 consultations from 213 patients suffering from various types
mender system is to find an optimal personalized therapy for a           of psoriasis. For each sample, i.e. each consultation in the collected
consultation under consideration by converting estimations of a          database, patient related attributes containing demographic data,
patient’s therapy response into recommendations.                         comorbidities and state of health as well as information on current
Within this contribution our previous approach is extended by a          and previous treatments are contained. All relevant therapies ap-
set of rules derived from evidence-based absolute contraindication       plied to a patient up to the consultation under consideration are
criteria in order to increase trust into and reduce risk of the demon-   summarized under previous treatments, whereas therapies which
strated overall system. The exemplary therapy decision support           were applied within the last two weeks preceding the respective
system is developed and evaluated targeting therapy recommen-            consultation are collected under current treatments.
dations for patients suffering from the autoimmune skin disease          For both, previous and current therapies, up to three different out-
psoriasis. Within this clinical application the developed therapy de-    come indicators are given, namely a therapy effectiveness indica-
cision support system aims at recommending the potentially most          tor (good, medium, bad) representing the subjective assessment,
effective systemic therapy for a given patient and consultation. The     an objective health state improvement indicator (Psoriasis Area
recommender system’s underlying conceptual framework, how-               and Severity Index [6]) and occurrence of adverse effects (yes, no).
ever, is intended to allow transferring the developed ideas to other     Overall therapy effectiveness is modeled using a weighted sum of
diseases and medical disciplines.                                        those three parameters as introduced in [8, 9] ranging from 0 (bad
The paper at hand is organized as follows. After presenting works        response) to 1 (good response). Thus, ground truth, i.e. actually
related to CDSS for therapy decision support in general and systems      applied therapy along with outcome for a given consultation, is
making use of CF techniques in particular, the available data, the       derived from the succeeding consultations therapy response.
applied evaluation procedure and the RS algorithm are described,         Table 1 and 2 summarize patient attributes and therapy information,
respectively. Finally, we present the results of the proposed method     respectively. All attributes are supplied with scale of measurement,
and summarize our findings leading to future works in the field.         range of values and availability relative to all consultations. In
                                                                         case of comorbidities and therapies the availability is related to all
                                                                         applied comorbidities or therapies, respectively.
2   RELATED WORK
Research on expert systems in clinical context date back to the 70ies.   3.2    Evaluation Procedure
Various approaches were published, deriving therapy decision sup-        The quality of RSs is typically evaluated concerning accuracy met-
port from computerized medical guidelines [4, 12]. However, as           rics for preference prediction performance as Root Mean Square
stated beforehand, knowledge-based approaches suffer from consid-        Error (RMSE) and decision support metrics for ranked lists of items
erable efforts during development and updating of the underlying         derived from information retrieval research as precision and recall
set of rules and are not always generally applicable. Proposed data-     [10]. Generally, quality is evaluated offline and retrospectively based
driven approaches on the other hand, typically apply machine learn-      on a test dataset comprising ratings on previously consumed items.
ing algorithms to derive therapy recommendations [17] or range           In the context of therapy RSs this implies that evaluation metrics
from majority voting [15], systems based on association rules [2] to     are computed on the actually applied therapy associated to a con-
approaches applying case-based reasoning [14]. In spite of gaining       sultation for which outcome is known. However, the focus of a
increasing popularity in other domains, the use of CF techniques         clinical recommender system should not only be to meet the ther-
is very limited in the context of CDSS. CF in the medical context        apy decision of the attending physician but finding therapies with
was proposed in scientific works [1, 22] but studies on clinical data    possibly good outcome and rejecting bad ones. Therefore, an ad-
are rare. There are few works applying CF algorithms for disease         ditional output-driven precision metric precisiono @N is used in
risk or mortality prediction [3, 11, 13]. Work loosely related to the    this study as introduced in [16] and previously demonstrated in
Neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering for Therapy Decision Support                            HealthRecSys’17, August 2017, Como, Italy


[9]. Precisiono @N is computed for each evaluated consultation on                         Table 1: Patient describing attributes
the top-N recommendations matching the actually applied therapy
only. That means, precision is defined as the ratio of recommenda-         Attribute                       Scale              Range          Availability %
tions having good outcome (true-positive T P) and all cases match-
                                                                           Patient Data
ing the actually applied therapy and having good or bad outcome
(true-positive T P and false-positive F P). Employing an effectiveness     Year of Birth                 interval        1931 - 1998              100
indicator threshold, data was divided into instances showing good          Gender                        nominal                1,2               100
outcome (effectiveness > 0.5) and the remaining ones.                      Weight                        interval          50 - 165               50
   Consequently, precisiono @N can be improved by increasing the
number of good outcome recommendations and rejecting bad out-              Size                          interval          99 - 204               36
come recommendations from the top-N recommendation list.                   Planned Child                 nominal               1,2,3              100
To make most out of the already limited amount of data, the pro-           Year of First Diagnosis       interval        1950 - 2014              90
posed algorithm is evaluated using a leave one out cross validation
(LOOCV) on the entire dataset. Multiple consultations from the             Family Anamnesis               ordinal              1,2,3              50
patient for which outcome prediction and recommendations are               Type of Psoriasis             nominal          1,2,3,4,5,6             100
evaluated are excluded from the training dataset during evaluation.        Comorbidities
                                                                           Comorbidity                   nominal          1,2,3,...,34             -
3.3    Demographic-enhanced Collaborative
                                                                           Status                         ordinal              1,2,3              100
       Filtering Recommender
The CF algorithm applied in this contribution and initially pre-           Under Treatment             dichotomous              0,1               45
sented in [8, 9] uses both, information on therapy history, i.e. pre-      State of Health
viously applied therapies and associated therapy response, along           PASI Score                    interval              0 - 43             69
with all information on a patient’s type of disease, comorbidities
and demographic data to represent consultations in the database.
Furthermore, the attribute vector was extended to incorporate addi-                       Table 2: Therapy describing attributes
tional information on disease progression and associated therapies.
To that end, attributes from the temporal sequence of state of health         Attribute                Scale          Range            Availability %
and applied therapies, i.e. lag features from preceding consultations,        Systemic Therapy       nominal        1,2,3,...,15             -
are added. The underlying assumption is that therapy history to-
gether with the stated patient and disease progress describing data           Effectiveness           ordinal          1,2,3                98
carries sufficient information to reliably compare consultations.             ∆PASI                  interval        -37 - 25               42
Additionally, by not relying on therapy history solely, the cold-start        Adverse Effect       dichotomous          0,1                 100
limitation can be overcome in cases where only limited or no in-
formation on therapy history is available. The overall objective
is to make prediction on patients having similar therapy history          confidence in automatically generated therapy recommendations
and characteristics. Therefore, similarity is computed between a          the risk of inaccurate or even health endangering recommendations
vector representation of the consultation under consideration and         must be minimized.
representations of all other consultations in the database. Attributes    For this purpose we implemented a set of exclusion rules based
representing consultations are (i) of various level of measurement        on European S3-Guidelines on the systemic treatment of psoriasis
and differ in range and are (ii) only intermittently available. A         [18] as summarized in table 3. Therapy options which are included
similarity metric capable of coping with both, missing values and         in the recommendations provided by the CF algorithms and are
varying levels of measurement, is the Gower Similarity Coefficient        affected by an exclusion criterion are removed from the list. Addi-
[7], which is applied in this work. Here, the level of measurement of     tionally, therapies showing good outcome in a patient’s previous
the individual attributes is respected for each attribute comparison      consultation were moved to the top of the list. Finally, from the
using a data type-specific similarity coefficients. Therapy outcome       modified recommendation list the top-3 entries are presented to
predictions are estimated based on a weighted sum of the k nearest        the user.
consultations to a consultation under consideration. In a subse-
quent recommendation step a list of therapy options, ordered by           4     EVALUATION RESULTS
outcome prediction, is available for further processing.
                                                                          Both precision@3 and outcome-driven precisiono @3 of the CF-
                                                                          based algorithm are highly dependent on the neighborhood size k
3.4    Exclusion rules                                                    incorporated into the outcome prediction computation (see figure
Particularly in the context of CDSS, trust plays a crucial role to        2). Outcome prediction accuracy and recommendation precision
leverage acceptance and applicability of such systems. However,           show extrema in the neighborhood of around k = 10...20. Integrat-
in contrast to other domains of RS applications, e.g. e-commerce          ing too many neighbors, i.e. increasing k, provokes a performance
applications, particular in the area of health and medicine failures in   decline due to noise influencing prediction accuracy and thus rec-
recommendations can accompany high risk. Therefore, to increase           ommendation precision. In contrast, outcome-driven precisiono @3
HealthRecSys’17, August 2017, Como, Italy                                                                                                       F. Gräßer et al.

         Table 3: Contraindications and exclusion rules.                                                 1




                                                                           Precision@3, Precisiono @3
          Contraindication      Excluded Therapy
          arterial hypertonia   Ciclosporin                                                             0.8
          renal disease         Ciclosporin
          hepatic disease       Methotrexat
                                                                                                        0.6
          cancerous disease     any Biologics
          planned child         Methotrexat, Acitretin
          psoriasis arthritis   Fumaderm, any UV therapies                                              0.4
                                                                                                              0       20    40            60     80         100
                                Acitrecin, Ciclosporin
                                                                                                                                  k

       0.08                                                                Figure 2: Overall precision@3 of therapy recommenda-
                                                                           tions and outcome-driven precisiono @3. precision@3 and
                                                                           precisiono @3 for the CF output (   ,     ) and with addi-
       0.07                                                                tional exclusion rules applied (  ,   ) are shown.
RMSE




       0.06                                                                                                   1
                                                                           consultation coverage

                                                                                                        0.99
       0.05
              0       20         40           60         80         100
                                       k
                                                                                                        0.98
Figure 1: RMSE (    ) computed between effectiveness esti-
mated by the CF recommender and effectiveness of actually                                               0.97
applied therapies.                                                                                                0    20    40            60     80          100
                                                                                                                                      k

seems to benefit from a somewhat larger neighborhood. However,             Figure 3: Consultation coverage, i.e. ratio of overall consul-
when comparing precisiono @3 for different k it must be kept in            tations for which recommendations could be provided. Con-
mind that precisiono @N highly depends precision@N .                       sultation coverage for the CF output (       ) and with addi-
Adding additional rules clearly increases recommendation preci-            tional exclusion rules applied (    ) are shown.
sion and outcome-driven precision. Continuing successful therapies
has favorable effect on recommendation precision. Furthermore,
therapy options which were successfully applied at neighboring pa-         similarity metric heavily affects the obtained results. Therefore,
tients, i.e. located in the top-3 list, can be contraindicated therapies   future efforts will concentrate on those aspects, namely feature
for a patient and consultation under consideration. Eliminating            selection methods [19] and metric learning algorithms [21, 24], to
them from the recommendation list moves non-contraindicated                further improve the proposed CF performance and contribute to
actually applied therapies to the top instead.                             create a basis for applicability and acceptance of suchlike CDSS.
For small neighborhoods, the coverage of possible therapy options          Besides the used features, it is shown that the neighborhood size k
can be too low to facilitate recommendations for a consultation            plays a vital role in terms of outcome prediction accuracy and rec-
under consideration leading to low overall consultation coverage.          ommendation quality. For the exemplary application an appropriate
Removing recommendations from the recommendation list affects              neighborhood size was determined by cross validation. However,
the coverage additionally as shown in 3. Consequently, adding ad-          this size can neither be expected to provide the best results in case
ditional exclusion rules demands for an increased neighborhood k           of an extended dataset nor it can be readily transferred to other
to facilitate satisfactory consultation coverage.                          problems. Aspects related to the neighborhood size will be further
                                                                           investigated in future studies, particularly incorporating more data.
5      CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS                                         In fact, one major limitation of this work is the rather small database
Our analyses show that the proposed prototype combining a data-            our studies are based on. Therefore, future work will address apply-
driven CF approach with evidence-based knowledge can provide               ing the proposed methods to more comprehensive datasets which
reliable personalized therapy recommendations. However, the selec-         we assume will improve the recommendation quality significantly.
tion and extraction of appropriate attributes and applying a suitable      Particularly, data provided by additional dermatologists needs to be
Neighborhood-based Collaborative Filtering for Therapy Decision Support                                                   HealthRecSys’17, August 2017, Como, Italy


incorporated into the database to prevent learning a limited number                              Update 2015 âĂŞ Short version âĂŞ EDF in cooperation with EADV and IPC.
of experts recommendations and improve generalization capability.                                Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology 29, 12 (2015),
                                                                                                 2277–2294.
As a consequence, another aspect which needs to be investigated                             [19] P. Pudil, F. Ferri, J. Novovicova, and J. Kittler. 1994. Floating search method for
in future works to both, improve recommendation quality and cope                                 feature selection with non monotonic criterion functions. Pattern Recognition 2
                                                                                                 (1994), 279–283.
with scalability issues when applied to large-scale data, is identi-                        [20] Xiaoyuan Su and Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar. 2009. A Survey of Collaborative Fil-
fying clusters in the database. This is intended to be done offline                              tering Techniques. Advances in Artificial Intelligence 3, Section 3 (2009), 1–19.
prior to actual recommendation generation.                                                       arXiv:421425
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS                                                                                  cepts, requirements, technical basics and challenges. International Journal of
This work is part of the project Therapieempfehlungssystem which                                 Environmental Research and Public Health 11, 3 (2014), 2580–2607.
                                                                                            [23] David Windridge and Miroslaw Bober. 2014. A Kernel-Based Framework for
is funded by the Roland Ernst Stiftung für Gesundheitswesen.                                     Medical Big-Data Analytics. Interactive Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in
                                                                                                 Biomedical Informatics: State-of-the-Art and Future Challenges (2014), 197–208.
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