Construction of Disease-Symptom Knowledge Graph from Web-Board Documents

Abstract

The research aim is to construct a disease-symptom knowledge graph (DSKG) as a cause-effect knowledge graph containing disease-symptom relations as a cause-effect relation type determined from downloaded documents on medical web-board resources. Each disease-symptom relation connects a disease-name concept node (a causative-concept node) to a corresponding node having a group of correlated symptom-concept/effect-concept features as common symptom-concept/effect-concept features among some disease-name concepts. The DSKG benefits non-professionals in preliminary diagnosis through a recommender web-board. There are three main problems: how to determine symptom concepts from sentences without annotation on the documents having disease-name concepts as the documents’ topic-names; how to determine the disease-symptom relations from the documents with/without complications; and how to construct the DSKG involving high dimensional symptom-concept features after union of the correlated symptom-concept groups. Therefore, we apply a word co-occurrence pattern including medical-symptom expressions from Wikipedia including MeSH and the Lexitron Dictionary to determine the symptom concepts. The Cartesian product is applied for automatic-supervised machine learning to determine the disease-symptom relation. We propose using Principal Component Analysis for constructing the DSKG by dimensionality reduction in the symptom-concept features with minimized information loss. In contrast to previous works, the proposed approach enables the DSKG construction with precise and concise representation scores of 7.8 and 9, respectively.