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April 2011

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From:
"Diane St. Germain" <[log in to unmask]>
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Date:
Thu, 7 Apr 2011 10:50:02 -0400
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> *Dissertation Defense Announcement:
> To:  The George Mason University Community*
>
> *William Anderson von Canon
> PhD Bioinformatics & Computational Biology Candidate
> *
> *Date:   Tuesday April 12, 2011
> Time:   4:30 p.m. 
> Place:  George Mason University
> ** 	     Occoquan Bldg. Room 203
> 	     Prince William campus <http://www.gmu.edu/resources/visitors/findex.html>
>   
> Dissertation Chair: Dr. Jeffrey Solka
> Committee members: Dr. James D. Willett, Dr. Jason Kinser*
> *Title: "Enhancement of Literature Based Discovery Using Advanced
> Computational Techniques and Evaluation of Potential Discoveries
> Related to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)"
> *
> The dissertation is on reserve in the Johnson Center Library, Fairfax campus.
> The doctoral project will not be read at the meeting, but should be read in advance. 
> /**/All members of the George Mason University community are invited to attend.
>
>
> *ABSTRACT: *
> Literature based discovery (LBD) has been
> used successfully to support analysis of medical literature and to identify
> potential non related topics that could support novel discoveries in disease
> research. As the concept of LBD expanded to the wider scientific community its
> potential value grew but its statistical underpinnings needed further
> refinement. The foundational research conducted by Don Swanson established a
> potential link between "fish oil" and "Raynauds" disease by analyzing
> literature inferences that linked the concepts indirectly through associated
> words that were not common to the direct topic literature sources. The
> identification of "joining words" that were common to each literature source
> helped link the two concepts of "disease" and "potential cure" that otherwise
> may not have been identified. This dissertation focused on enhancing LBD with
> new probabilistic techniques that could increase the accuracy and efficiency of
> discovering literature similarities while enforcing a more stringent
> statistical foundation for the technique. The initial LBD research conducted by
> Gordon/Dumais on Raynaud's disease, using the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
> technique, was recreated as part of this analysis. Two new statistical
> techniques, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Non-Negative
> Matrix Factorization (NMF), were evaluated and supported increased precision in
> intermediate literature identification and potential literature inferred
> discovery over the original LSI technique. These techniques were then used to
> conduct LBD on another novel disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The
> investigation of NMF and PLSA as new computation approaches did validate
> quantifiable enhancements over the previous LSI techniques. While they enhanced
> the level of accuracy and efficiency in both literature/ B /and/ C /discovery, the
> aspect of being able to use each computational technique as reinforcement for
> the other method's findings proved very interesting and will provide the
> researcher stronger statistical LBD models in support of current and future
> scientific discovery.
>
> ###
>   




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