Discovering temporal bisociations for linking concepts over time

Abstract

Bisociations represent interesting relationships between seemingly unconnected concepts from two or more contexts. Most of the existing approaches that permit the discovery of bisociations from data rely on the assumption that contexts are static or considered as unchangeable domains. Actually, several real-world domains are intrinsically dynamic and can change over time. The same domain can change and can become completely different from what/how it was before: a dynamic domain observed at different time-points can present different representations and can be reasonably assimilated to a series of distinct static domains. In this work, we investigate the task of linking concepts from a dynamic domain through the discovery of bisociations which link concepts over time. This provides us with a means to unearth linkages which have not been discovered when observing the domain as static, but which may have developed over time, when considering the dynamic nature. We propose a computational solution which, assuming a time interval-based discretization of the domain, explores the spaces of association rules mined in the intervals and chains the rules on the basis of the concept generalization and information theory criteria. The application to the literature-based discovery shows how the method can re-discover known connections in biomedical terminology. Experiments and comparisons using alternative techniques highlight the additional peculiarities of this work. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.