Machine Learning Assisted Discovery of Novel Predictive Lab Tests Using Electronic Health Record Data

Epidemiological studies identifying biological markers of disease state are valuable, but can be time-consuming, expensive, and require extensive intuition and expertise. Furthermore, not all hypothesized markers will be borne out in a study, suggesting that higher quality initial hypotheses are crucial. In this work, we propose a high-throughput pipeline to produce a ranked list of high-quality hypothesized marker laboratory tests for diagnoses. Our pipeline generates a large number of candidate lab-diagnosis hypotheses derived from machine learning models, filters and ranks them according to their potential novelty using text mining, and corroborate final hypotheses with logistic regression analysis. We test our approach on a large electronic health record dataset and the PubMed corpus, and find several promising candidate hypotheses