Using similarity measures for medical event sequences to predict mortality in trauma patients

Joel Fredrickson, Michael Mannino, Omar Alqahtani, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani
Decision Support Systems,Vol. 116, Pages: 35-47.
We extend a similarity measure for medical event sequences (MESs) and evaluate its classification performance for retrospective mortality prediction of trauma patient outcomes. Retrospective mortality prediction is a benchmarking task used by trauma care governance bodies to assist with policy decisions. We extend the similarity measure, the Optimal Temporal Common Subsequence for MESs (OTCS-MES), by generalizing the event-matching component with a plug-in weighting element. The extended OTCS-MES uses an event prevalence weight developed in our previous study and an event severity weight developed for this study. In the empirical evaluation of classification performance, we provide a more complete evaluation than previous studies. We compare the predictive performance of the Trauma Mortality Prediction Model (TMPM), an accepted regression approach for mortality prediction in trauma data