Association Rules and Data Mining in Hospital Infection Control and Public Health Surveillance

Abstract

A b s t r a c t Objectives:The authors consider the problem of identifying new, unexpected, and interesting patterns in hospital infection control and public health surveillance data and present a new data analysis process and system based on association rules to address this problem. Design:The authors first illustrate the need for automated pattern discovery and data mining in hospital infection control and public health surveillance. Next, they define association rules, explain how those rules can be used in surveillance, and present a novel process and systemthe Data Mining Surveillance System (DMSS) -that utilize association rules to identify new and interesting patterns in surveillance data. Results: Experimental results were obtained using DMSS to analyzePseudomonas aeruginosa infection control data collected over one year (1996) at University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital. Experiments using one-, three-, and six-month time partitions yielded 34, 57, and 28 statistically significant events, respectively. Although not all statistically significant events are clinically significant, a subset of events generated in each analysis indicated potentially significant shifts in the occurrence of infection or antimicrobial resistance patterns of P. aeruginosa. Conclusion:The new process and system are efficient and effective in identifying new, unexpected, and interesting patterns in surveillance data. The clinical relevance and utility of this process await the results of prospective studies currently in progress.Ⅲ JAMIA. 1998;5:373 -381. Surveillance systems are essential in detecting new and re-emerging threats of infectious agents in public health and hospital settings.1 -3 The effectiveness of these systems is determined by their ability to rapidly analyze time-series data to detect unusual disease clusters.

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