Assessing the Heterogeneity of Complaints Related to Tinnitus and Hyperacusis from an Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach: An Exploratory Study

Introduction: Subjective tinnitus (ST) and hyperacusis (HA) are common auditory symptoms that may become incapacitating in a subgroup of patients who thereby seek medical advice. Both conditions can result from many different mechanisms, and as a consequence, patients may report a vast repertoire of associated symptoms and comorbidities that can reduce dramatically the quality of life and even lead to suicide attempts in the most severe cases. The present exploratory study is aimed at investigating patients’ symptoms and complaints using an in-depth statistical analysis of patients’ natural narratives in a real-life environment in which, thanks to the anonymization of contributions and the peer-to-peer interaction, it is supposed that the wording used is totally free of any self-limitation and self-censorship. Methods: We applied a purely statistical, non-supervised machine learning approach to the analysis of patients’ verbatim exchanged on an Internet forum. After automated data extraction, the dataset has been preprocessed in order to make it suitable for statistical analysis. We used a variant of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm to reveal clusters of symptoms and complaints of HA patients (topics). The probability of distribution of words within a topic uniquely characterizes it. The convergence of the log-likelihood of the LDA-model has been reached after 2,000 iterations. Several statistical parameters have been tested for topic modeling and word relevance factor within each topic. Results: Despite a rather small dataset, this exploratory study demonstrates that patients’ free speeches available on the Internet constitute a valuable material for machine learning and statistical analysis aimed at categorizing ST/HA complaints. The LDA model with K = 15 topics seems to be the most relevant in terms of relative weights and correlations with the capability to individualizing subgroups of patients displaying specific characteristics. The study of the relevance factor may be useful to unveil weak but important signals that are present in patients’ narratives. Discussion/Conclusion: We claim that the LDA non-supervised approach would permit to gain knowledge on the patterns of ST- and HA-related complaints and on patients’ centered domains of interest. The merits and limitations of the LDA algorithms are compared with other natural language processing methods and with more conventional methods of qualitative analysis of patients’ output. Future directions and research topics emerging from this innovative algorithmic analysis are proposed.

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Mol2vec: Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach with Chemical Intuition

10.26434/chemrxiv.5513581.v1 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Sabrina Jaeger ◽

Simone Fulle ◽

Samo Turk

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Language Processing ◽

Supervised Machine Learning ◽

Learning Approach ◽

Learning Approaches ◽

Unsupervised Machine Learning ◽

Feature Representations ◽

Machine Learning Approach ◽

The Individual ◽

Vector Representations

Inspired by natural language processing techniques we here introduce Mol2vec which is an unsupervised machine learning approach to learn vector representations of molecular substructures. Similarly, to the Word2vec models where vectors of closely related words are in close proximity in the vector space, Mol2vec learns vector representations of molecular substructures that are pointing in similar directions for chemically related substructures. Compounds can finally be encoded as vectors by summing up vectors of the individual substructures and, for instance, feed into supervised machine learning approaches to predict compound properties. The underlying substructure vector embeddings are obtained by training an unsupervised machine learning approach on a so-called corpus of compounds that consists of all available chemical matter. The resulting Mol2vec model is pre-trained once, yields dense vector representations and overcomes drawbacks of common compound feature representations such as sparseness and bit collisions. The prediction capabilities are demonstrated on several compound property and bioactivity data sets and compared with results obtained for Morgan fingerprints as reference compound representation. Mol2vec can be easily combined with ProtVec, which employs the same Word2vec concept on protein sequences, resulting in a proteochemometric approach that is alignment independent and can be thus also easily used for proteins with low sequence similarities.

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HAMLET

Terminology ◽

10.1075/term.20017.rig ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ayla Rigouts Terryn ◽

Véronique Hoste ◽

Els Lefever

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Language Processing ◽

Hybrid Approach ◽

Substantial Effect ◽

Training Data ◽

Supervised Machine Learning ◽

Learning Approach ◽

Term Extraction ◽

Machine Learning Approach ◽

Different Types

Abstract Automatic term extraction (ATE) is an important task within natural language processing, both separately, and as a preprocessing step for other tasks. In recent years, research has moved far beyond the traditional hybrid approach where candidate terms are extracted based on part-of-speech patterns and filtered and sorted with statistical termhood and unithood measures. While there has been an explosion of different types of features and algorithms, including machine learning methodologies, some of the fundamental problems remain unsolved, such as the ambiguous nature of the concept “term”. This has been a hurdle in the creation of data for ATE, meaning that datasets for both training and testing are scarce, and system evaluations are often limited and rarely cover multiple languages and domains. The ACTER Annotated Corpora for Term Extraction Research contain manual term annotations in four domains and three languages and have been used to investigate a supervised machine learning approach for ATE, using a binary random forest classifier with multiple types of features. The resulting system (HAMLET Hybrid Adaptable Machine Learning approach to Extract Terminology) provides detailed insights into its strengths and weaknesses. It highlights a certain unpredictability as an important drawback of machine learning methodologies, but also shows how the system appears to have learnt a robust definition of terms, producing results that are state-of-the-art, and contain few errors that are not (part of) terms in any way. Both the amount and the relevance of the training data have a substantial effect on results, and by varying the training data, it appears to be possible to adapt the system to various desired outputs, e.g., different types of terms. While certain issues remain difficult – such as the extraction of rare terms and multiword terms – this study shows how supervised machine learning is a promising methodology for ATE.

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