Feature plus plus : Automatic Feature Construction for Clinical Data Analysis

With the rapid growth of clinical data and knowledge, feature construction for clinical analysis becomes increasingly important and challenging. Given a clinical dataset with up to hundreds or thousands of columns, the traditional manual feature construction process is usually too labour intensive to generate a full spectrum of features with potential values. As a result, advanced large-scale data analysis technologies, such as feature selection for predictive modelling, cannot be fully utilized for clinical data analysis. In this paper, we propose an automatic feature construction framework for clinical data analysis, namely, Feature++. It leverages available public knowledge to understand the semantics of the clinical data, and is able to integrate external data sources to automatically construct new features based on predefined rules and clinical knowledge. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Feature++ in a typical predictive modelling use case with a public clinical dataset, and the results suggest that the proposed approach is able to fulfil typical feature construction tasks with minimal dataset specific configurations, so that more accurate models can be obtained from various clinical datasets in a more efficient way.