Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Biomedical Informatics: The Future Is in Integrative, Interactive Machine Learning Solutions

Biomedical research is drowning in data, yet starving for knowledge. Current challenges in biomedical research and clinical practice include information overload – the need to combine vast amounts of structured, semi-structured, weakly structured data and vast amounts of unstructured information – and the need to optimize workflows, processes and guidelines, to increase capacity while reducing costs and improving efficiencies. In this paper we provide a very short overview on interactive and integrative solutions for knowledge discovery and data mining. In particular, we emphasize the benefits of including the end user into the “interactive” knowledge discovery process. We describe some of the most important challenges, including the need to develop and apply novel methods, algorithms and tools for the integration, fusion, pre-processing, mapping, analysis and interpretation of complex biomedical data with the aim to identify testable hypotheses, and build realistic models. The HCI-KDD approach, which is a synergistic combination of methodologies and approaches of two areas, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD), offer ideal conditions towards solving these challenges: with the goal of supporting human intelligence with machine intelligence. There is an urgent need for integrative and interactive machine learning solutions, because no medical doctor or biomedical researcher can keep pace today with the increasingly large and complex data sets – often called “Big Data”.