Learning objectives

Knowledge and understanding The course aims to introduce principles that form the foundations of the Decision Support System together with case-studies of their real-world applications, with particular focus on their use in Biomedical domain. In particular, the purpose of the course consists of providing advanced knowledge on the techniques and principles involved in managing and manipulating very large databases (with specific examples borrowed from the biomedical domain). Moreover, the course will provide the theretical and practical foundations of the main data mining techniques used in clinical domains. Applying knowledge and understanding During the course students will aquire the following competences: - they will be able to choose and use the appropriate components in order to provide solution for supporting decision to the medical staff; - they will be able torealize complex operations of Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) on several clinical data types coming from different sources (Relational Databases, API, Websites, and so on) and encoded in both structure (relational tables) and semi-structured (XML) fashion; -they will be able to model and realize OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) solutions for supportuing decisions in a Biomedical context; -they will be able to use or adapt advanced data-mining techniques (Approximate Functional Dependencies, Association Rules, Entropy-based Classifiers, and so on) for extracting knowledge from large amounts of data. Making judgements Students will develop the required skills in order to be autonomous in the following tasks: - choose and apply data mining techniques for extracting medical knowledge from large amount of data; - choose the appropriate graphical/interactive representations for represent specific clinical information. Communication skills The student will learn how to address the correct priorities to the informations that must be reported to the end-user according to his needs and the language of his domain. Learning skills The students will be introduced to the main algorithms and techniques used in the clinical data mining field, together with the description of the factors that affect their efficiency and effectiveness. This knowledge will be the basis for comprehend more specific techniques adopted nowadays for data mining for clinical domain. Moreover, the student will be able to choose autonomously the data mining techinque for answering a given quesry of the end-user. Finally, he will be able to evaluate the performance and the accuracy of the proposed solution.