Classification automatique de textes pour les revues de littérature mixtes en santé
The interest of health researchers and policy-makers in literature reviews has continued to increase over the years. Mixed studies reviews are highly valued since they combine results from the best available studies on various topics while considering quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods. These reviews can be used for several purposes such as justifying, designing and interpreting results of primary studies. Due to the proliferation of published papers and the growing number of nonempirical works such as editorials and opinion letters, screening records for mixed studies reviews is time consuming. Traditionally, reviewers are required to manually identify potential relevant studies. In order to facilitate this process, a comparison of different automated text classification methods was conducted in order to determine the most effective and robust approach to facilitate systematic mixed studies reviews.   The group of algorithms considered in this study combined decision trees, naive Bayes classifiers, k-nearest neighbours, support vector machines and voting approaches. Statistical techniques were applied to assess the relevancy of multiple features according to a predefined dataset. The benefits of feature combination for numerical terms, synonyms and mathematical symbols were also measured. Furthermore, concepts extracted from a metathesaurus were used as additional features in order to improve the training process.   Using the titles and abstracts of approximately 10,000 entries, decision trees perform the best with an accuracy of 88.76%, followed by support vector machine (86.94%). The final model based on decision trees relies on linear interpolation and a group of concepts extracted from a metathesaurus. This approach outperforms the mixed filters commonly used with bibliographic databases like MEDLINE. However, references chosen for training must be selected judiciously in order to address the model instability and the disparity of quantitative and qualitative study designs.
Automated text classification Systematic review Mixed study Research method Health care Decision tree Support vector machine