A method for automated temporal knowledge acquisition applied to sleep-related breathing disorders

This paper presents a method for the discovery of temporal patterns in multivariate time series and their conversion into a linguistic knowledge representation applied to sleep-related breathing disorders. The main idea ties in introducing several abstraction levels that allow a step-wise identification of temporal patterns. Self-organizing neural networks are used to discover elementary patterns in the time series. Machine learning (NIL) algorithms use the results of the neural networks to automatically generate a rule-based description. At the next levels, temporal grammatical rules are inferred. This method covers one of the main "bottlenecks" in the design of knowledge-based systems, namely, the knowledge acquisition problem. An evaluation of the rules lead to an overall sensitivity of 0.762, and a specificity of 0.758. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.