Semantic Data Types in Machine Learning from Healthcare Data

Healthcare is particularly rich in semantic information and background knowledge describing data. This paper discusses a number of semantic data types that can be found in healthcare data, presents how the semantics can be extracted from existing sources including the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), discusses how the semantics can be used in both supervised and unsupervised learning, and presents an example rule learning system that implements several of these types. Results from three example applications in the healthcare domain are used to further exemplify semantic data types.