Collaborative data mining for clinical trial analytics

Clinical research and drug development trials generate large amounts of data. Due to the dispersed nature of clinical trial data across multiple sites and heterogeneous databases, it remains a challenge to harness these trial data for analytics to gain more understanding about the implementation of studies as well as disease processes. Moreover, the veracity of the results from analytics is difficult to establish in such datasets. We make a two-fold contribution in this paper: First, we provide a mechanism to extract task-relevant data using Master Data Management (MDM) from a clinical trial database with data spread over several domain datasets. Second, we provide a method for validating findings by collaborative utilization of multiple data mining techniques, namely: classification, clustering, and association rule mining. Overall, our approach aims at extracting useful knowledge from data collected during clinical trials to enable the development of faster and cheaper clinical trials that more accurate and impactful. For a demonstration of the efficacy of our proposed methods, we utilized the following datasets: (1) the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) data share repository and (2) the data from the Osteoarthritis initiative (OAI), where we found real-world implications in validating the findings using multiple data mining methods in a collaborative manner. The comparative results with existing state of the art techniques show the usefulness and high accuracy of our methods.