SMILE: a feature-based temporal abstraction framework for event-interval sequence classification

In this paper, we study the problem of classification of sequences of temporal intervals. Our main contribution is a novel framework, which we call SMILE, for extracting relevant features from interval sequences to construct classifiers.SMILE introduces the notion of utilizing random temporal abstraction features, we define as e-lets, as a means to capture information pertaining to class-discriminatory events which occur across the span of complete interval sequences. Our empirical evaluation is applied to a wide array of benchmark data sets and fourteen novel datasets for adverse drug event detection. We demonstrate how the introduction of simple sequential features, followed by progressively more complex features each improve classification performance. Importantly, this investigation demonstrates that SMILE significantly improves AUC performance over the current state-of-the-art. The investigation also reveals that the selection of underlying classification algorithm is important to achieve superior predictive performance, and how the number of features influences the performance of our framework.