Dementia diagnosis relies on identifying neuropathological features, such as beta-amyloid (Aβ) deposition, medial temporal lobe atrophy (MTA), and white matter hyperintensity (WMH). Recently, plasma protein biomarkers have emerged as a cost-effective and less invasive tool for identifying neuropathological features, enhanced by machine learning (ML) for precise diagnosis. However, most ML studies fail to account for protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and synergetic effects between proteins, overlooking their collective contributions to disease mechanisms. Additionally, the lack of consideration for functional properties may result in the redundant and imbalanced representation of proteins and their functions, potentially limiting the effectiveness of dementia diagnosis. In this study, we propose NeuroFANN, a method designed to classify three neuropathological subtypes in dementia-positivity for Aβ, MTA, and WMH-using plasma protein biomarkers. A key feature of NeuroFANN is the combination of the PPI network-based synergetic effects with the functional annotation-based protein biomarker clustering. NeuroFANN extracts synergetic effects by propagating independent effects of proteins across the PPI network, which are then aggregated in functional protein clusters, thereby enabling global PPI awareness and capturing the biological properties of protein biomarkers. From a South Korean cohort, 54 proteins were identified as plasma protein biomarkers for dementia subtypes and grouped into 16 clusters. NeuroFANN outperformed comparison methods in classifying dementia subtypes, with its core components validated as key contributors to superior performance. Additionally, the risk scores predicted by NeuroFANN showed a strong association with longitudinal cognitive decline, demonstrating its potential as a valuable diagnostic tool in clinical settings.

Utility-driven pattern analysis is a fundamental method for analyzing noteworthy patterns with high utility for diverse quantitative transactional databases. Recently, various approaches have emerged to handle large, dynamic database environments more efficiently by reducing the number of data scans and pattern expansion operations with the pre-large concept. However, existing pre-large-based high utility pattern mining methods either fail to handle real-time transaction modifications or require additional data scans to validate candidate patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient utility-driven pattern mining algorithm using the pre-large concept for transaction modifications. Our method incorporates a single-scan-based framework through the management of actual utility values and discovers high utility patterns without candidate generation for efficient utility-driven dynamic data analysis in the modification environment. We compared the performance of the proposed method with state-of-the-art methods through extensive performance evaluation utilizing real and synthetic datasets. According to the evaluation results and a case study, the suggested method performs a minimum of 1.5 times faster than state-of-the-art methods alongside minimal compromise in memory, and it scaled well with increases in database size. Further statistical analyses indicate that the proposed method reduces the pattern search space compared to the previous method while delivering a complete set of accurate results without loss.

Pattern mining, one of the data analysis approaches, provides meaningful assistance for various business services, such as product recommendation and marketing. However, certain real-world data contain uncertain characteristics, and some business services want to consider the uncertainty of data. Uncertain pattern mining is an advanced technique for discovering more useful patterns from uncertainty-driven data with uncertain information about items. However, although many business services create and process incremental data in real-time, most of the previous uncertain pattern mining techniques have limitations in analyzing incremental data since they mainly focus on processing static data. To address the limitations, we present a list-based uncertain pattern mining method that effectively analyzes incremental uncertainty-driven data in real time by scanning stream data only once. In addition, uncertainty-driven data analytics can be executed efficiently due to the list structure that is effective in construction and mining. The tests of performance for runtime, memory consumption, and scalability are performed using real datasets and synthetic datasets, which illustrate that the suggested technique reveals outstanding performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. The additional case study evaluations with concept-drifting tests as well as accuracy and significance tests demonstrate the practical applications of the algorithm and the quality of the extracted results.

In a manufacturing factory, product lines are organized by several constituents and exhibit a profit value, i.e., income from products. Erasable patterns are less profitable patterns whose gain, i.e., the sum of product profits, does not exceed a user-defined threshold. Mining erasable patterns provides the necessary information to users who want to increase profits by erasing less profitable patterns. There are requirements for a method which efficiently manages uncertain databases in incremental environments to identify erasable patterns that consider uncertainty. Because our novel technique uses a list structure, it is more efficient at finding erasable patterns from incremental databases. Moreover, accumulated stream data should be handled efficiently to identify new useful patterns in both additional data and the existing data. In this article, an algorithm using a list-based structure is proposed to extract erasable patterns containing valuable knowledge from uncertain databases in real time with effective and productive performance. In order to derive erasable patterns from continuously accumulated stream databases, the structure efficiently manages the information gathered from the previous database. Extensive performance and pattern quality evaluations were conducted using real and synthetic datasets. The results show that the algorithm performs up to seven times faster than state-of-the-art erasable pattern mining algorithms on real datasets and scales adeptly on synthetic datasets while delivering reliable and significant result patterns.

Plasma protein biomarkers have been considered promising tools for diagnosing dementia subtypes due to their low variability, cost-effectiveness, and minimal invasiveness in diagnostic procedures. Machine learning (ML) methods have been applied to enhance accuracy of the biomarker discovery. However, previous ML-based studies often overlook interactions between proteins, which are crucial in complex disorders like dementia. While protein-protein interactions (PPIs) have been used in network models, these models often fail to fully capture the diverse properties of PPIs due to their local awareness. This drawback increases the chance of neglecting critical components and magnifying the impact of noisy interactions. In this study, we propose a novel graph-based ML model for dementia subtype diagnosis, the graph propagational network (GPN). By propagating the independent effect of plasma proteins on PPI network, the GPN extracts the globally interactive effects between proteins. Experimental results showed that the interactive effect between proteins yielded to further clarify the differences between dementia subtype groups and contributed to the performance improvement where the GPN outperformed existing methods by 10.4% on average.