Date of Award

12-1-2014

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Rahimi, Shahram

Abstract

In this work, we utilize Self Organized Maps (SOM) to cluster and classify hospital related data with large dimensions, provided by Medicare website. These data have published every year and it includes numerous measures for each hospital in the nationwide. It might be possible to unearth some correlations in health-care industry by being able to interpreting this dataset, for example by examining the relations between data of immunizations department to readmission records and hospital expenses. It is not feasible to make any sense from these measures altogether using traditional methods (2D or 3D charts, diagrams or graphs, different tables), because as a result of being human, we cannot comprehend more than 3 dimensions with naked eyes. Since it would be very useful if we could correlate the dimensions to each other to discover new patterns and knowledge, SOMs are a type of Artificial Neural Networks that can be trained using unsupervised learning to illustrate complex and high dimensional data by generating a low dimension representation of the training sample. This way, a powerful and easy-to-interpret visualization will be provided for healthcare officials to rapidly identify the correlation between different attributes of the dataset using clusters illustration

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