How big data and machine learning could change the game

With recent advances in the acquisition and digitisation of medical data, the use of routinely collected health data for research is on the rise. Routinely collected data comes with the promise of the 3 V’s of “big data”: volume, velocity, and variety. Recent recommendations by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the Academy of Medical Sciences have therefore acknowledged the potential for data science methods to play an increasingly important role in healthcare research. Against this backdrop of growing data and increasing computational resources, the use of data science methods including machine learning is becoming popular for analysing large-scale medical datasets. This talk provides a brief overview of machine learning methods for healthcare applications including an introduction to supervised and unsupervised learning, followed by real-world examples of data analysis using machine learning, such as (a) the development of prognostic models for clinical risk assessment, and (b) mining of electronic health records for detecting patterns and phenotypes within a population. Disclosure of Interest None declared