VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Lauren Costa
dblp:239/1432
· DBLP profile ↗
5ranked-venue papers
0as first author
4since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-7237-5336ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 5 · 4 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
1 paper |
Bioinformatics and computational biology · 75% Medical and health informatics · 25% |
Topics — the 4 heaviest of 4, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Bioinformatics and computational biology › drug discovery › drug repositioning
drug-disease association prediction |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Multimodal representation learning for predicting molecule-disease relations · Bioinform. 2023 |
Bioinformatics and computational biology › drug discovery
drug repurposing |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Multimodal representation learning for predicting molecule-disease relations · Bioinform. 2023 |
Bioinformatics and computational biology › drug discovery
drug side effect prediction |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Multimodal representation learning for predicting molecule-disease relations · Bioinform. 2023 |
Medical and health informatics
pharmacovigilance |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Multimodal representation learning for predicting molecule-disease relations · Bioinform. 2023 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
multimodal representation learning · 0.7electronic health records · 0.7deep neural network · 0.7
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | ARCH: Large-scale knowledge graph via aggregated narrative codified health records analysis
Ziming Gan, Doudou Zhou, Everett Neil Rush, Vidul Ayakulangara Panickan, Yuk-Lam Ho, George Ostrouchov, Shuting Shen, Xin Xiong 0006, Kimberly F. Greco, Chuan Hong, Clara-Lea Bonzel, Jun Wen 0001, Lauren Costa, Tianrun A. Cai, Edmon Begoli, Zongqi Xia, John Michael Gaziano, Katherine P. Liao, Kelly Cho, Tianxi Cai |
J. Biomed. Informatics | 14 |
| 2025 | DOME: Directional medical embedding vectors from Electronic Health RecordsabstractMOTIVATION: The increasing availability of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems has created enormous potential for translational research. Recent developments in representation learning techniques have led to effective large-scale representations of EHR concepts along with knowledge graphs that empower downstream EHR studies. However, most existing methods require training with patient-level data, limiting their abilities to expand the training with multi-institutional EHR data. On the other hand, scalable approaches that only require summary-level data do not incorporate temporal dependencies between concepts. METHODS: We introduce a DirectiOnal Medical Embedding (DOME) algorithm to encode temporally directional relationships between medical concepts, using summary-level EHR data. Specifically, DOME first aggregates patient-level EHR data into an asymmetric co-occurrence matrix. Then it computes two Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (PPMI) matrices to correspondingly encode the pairwise prior and posterior dependencies between medical concepts. Following that, a joint matrix factorization is performed on the two PPMI matrices, which results in three vectors for each concept: a semantic embedding and two directional context embeddings. They collectively provide a comprehensive depiction of the temporal relationship between EHR concepts. RESULTS: We highlight the advantages and translational potential of DOME through three sets of validation studies. First, DOME consistently improves existing direction-agnostic embedding vectors for disease risk prediction in several diseases, for example achieving a relative gain of 5.5% in the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) for lung cancer. Second, DOME excels in directional drug-disease relationship inference by successfully differentiating between drug side effects and indications, correspondingly achieving relative AUROC gain over the state-of-the-art methods by 10.8% and 6.6%. Finally, DOME effectively constructs directional knowledge graphs, which distinguish disease risk factors from comorbidities, thereby revealing disease progression trajectories. The source codes are provided at https://github.com/celehs/Directional-EHR-embedding. Jun Wen 0001, Hao Xue 0005, Everett Neil Rush, Vidul Ayakulangara Panickan, Tianrun A. Cai, Doudou Zhou, Yuk-Lam Ho, Lauren Costa, Edmon Begoli, Chuan Hong, John Michael Gaziano, Kelly Cho, Katherine P. Liao, Tianxi Cai |
J. Biomed. Informatics | 8 |
| 2023 | Multimodal representation learning for predicting molecule-disease relationsabstractMOTIVATION: Predicting molecule-disease indications and side effects is important for drug development and pharmacovigilance. Comprehensively mining molecule-molecule, molecule-disease and disease-disease semantic dependencies can potentially improve prediction performance. METHODS: We introduce a Multi-Modal REpresentation Mapping Approach to Predicting molecular-disease relations (M2REMAP) by incorporating clinical semantics learned from electronic health records (EHR) of 12.6 million patients. Specifically, M2REMAP first learns a multimodal molecule representation that synthesizes chemical property and clinical semantic information by mapping molecule chemicals via a deep neural network onto the clinical semantic embedding space shared by drugs, diseases and other common clinical concepts. To infer molecule-disease relations, M2REMAP combines multimodal molecule representation and disease semantic embedding to jointly infer indications and side effects. RESULTS: We extensively evaluate M2REMAP on molecule indications, side effects and interactions. Results show that incorporating EHR embeddings improves performance significantly, for example, attaining an improvement over the baseline models by 23.6% in PRC-AUC on indications and 23.9% on side effects. Further, M2REMAP overcomes the limitation of existing methods and effectively predicts drugs for novel diseases and emerging pathogens. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The code is available at https://github.com/celehs/M2REMAP, and prediction results are provided at https://shiny.parse-health.org/drugs-diseases-dev/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. Jun Wen 0001, Xiang Zhang 0012, Everett Neil Rush, Vidul Ayakulangara Panickan, Tianrun A. Cai, Doudou Zhou, Yuk-Lam Ho, Lauren Costa, Edmon Begoli, Chuan Hong, John Michael Gaziano, Kelly Cho, Katherine P. Liao, Marinka Zitnik, Tianxi Cai |
Bioinform. | 9 |
| 2022 | Multiview Incomplete Knowledge Graph Integration with application to cross-institutional EHR data harmonizationabstractOBJECTIVE: The growing availability of electronic health records (EHR) data opens opportunities for integrative analysis of multi-institutional EHR to produce generalizable knowledge. A key barrier to such integrative analyses is the lack of semantic interoperability across different institutions due to coding differences. We propose a Multiview Incomplete Knowledge Graph Integration (MIKGI) algorithm to integrate information from multiple sources with partially overlapping EHR concept codes to enable translations between healthcare systems. METHODS: The MIKGI algorithm combines knowledge graph information from (i) embeddings trained from the co-occurrence patterns of medical codes within each EHR system and (ii) semantic embeddings of the textual strings of all medical codes obtained from the Self-Aligning Pretrained BERT (SAPBERT) algorithm. Due to the heterogeneity in the coding across healthcare systems, each EHR source provides partial coverage of the available codes. MIKGI synthesizes the incomplete knowledge graphs derived from these multi-source embeddings by minimizing a spherical loss function that combines the pairwise directional similarities of embeddings computed from all available sources. MIKGI outputs harmonized semantic embedding vectors for all EHR codes, which improves the quality of the embeddings and enables direct assessment of both similarity and relatedness between any pair of codes from multiple healthcare systems. RESULTS: With EHR co-occurrence data from Veteran Affairs (VA) healthcare and Mass General Brigham (MGB), MIKGI algorithm produces high quality embeddings for a variety of downstream tasks including detecting known similar or related entity pairs and mapping VA local codes to the relevant EHR codes used at MGB. Based on the cosine similarity of the MIKGI trained embeddings, the AUC was 0.918 for detecting similar entity pairs and 0.809 for detecting related pairs. For cross-institutional medical code mapping, the top 1 and top 5 accuracy were 91.0% and 97.5% when mapping medication codes at VA to RxNorm medication codes at MGB; 59.1% and 75.8% when mapping VA local laboratory codes to LOINC hierarchy. When trained with 500 labels, the lab code mapping attained top 1 and 5 accuracy at 77.7% and 87.9%. MIKGI also attained best performance in selecting VA local lab codes for desired laboratory tests and COVID-19 related features for COVID EHR studies. Compared to existing methods, MIKGI attained the most robust performance with accuracy the highest or near the highest across all tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed MIKGI algorithm can effectively integrate incomplete summary data from biomedical text and EHR data to generate harmonized embeddings for EHR codes for knowledge graph modeling and cross-institutional translation of EHR codes. Doudou Zhou, Ziming Gan, Alina Patwari, Everett Neil Rush, Clara-Lea Bonzel, Vidul Ayakulangara Panickan, Chuan Hong, Yuk-Lam Ho, Tianrun A. Cai, Lauren Costa, Victor M. Castro, Shawn N. Murphy, Gabriel A. Brat, Griffin M. Weber, Paul Avillach, John Michael Gaziano, Kelly Cho, Katherine P. Liao, Tianxi Cai |
J. Biomed. Informatics | 11 |
| 2018 | High-Throughput Multimodal Automated Phenotyping (MAP) Incorporating Natural Language Processing with Application to PheWAS
Katherine P. Liao, Jiehuan Sun, Tianrun A. Cai, Nicholas B. Link, Chuan Hong, Jie Huang 0030, Jennifer E. Huffman, Jessica L. Gronsbell, Lauren Costa, Victor M. Castro, Vivian S. Gainer, Shawn N. Murphy, John Michael Gaziano, Kelly Cho, Peter Szolovits, Isaac S. Kohane, Sheng Yu 0002, Tianxi Cai |
AMIA | 9 |