Using Time Decompositions to Analyze PubMed Abstracts

Constructing time decompositions of time stamped documents is an important step for uncovering temporal relationships and trends of keywords and topics contained in the document set. This paper describes the use of time decompositions to extract temporal information from a small set of PubMed abstracts related to the Wnt signaling pathway. A time decomposition of the document set is constructed to identify temporal information such as keywords/topics significant in some time interval and to also identify temporal progression of the significant keywords. Keywords were assigned temporal significance values using two different measure functions based on notions of entropy and ratio. It is shown how optimal lossy decompositions of the document set are effective in reducing noise both in terms of the number of keywords as well as in terms of smoothing out the temporal progressions of keywords. Several optimal lossy decompositions for the document set are constructed and it is shown that the temporal information captured by an optimal lossy decomposition increases as its size (number of intervals) increases