Generating Interpretable Hypotheses Based on Syllogistic Patterns

The ever-growing literature in biomedicine makes it virtually impossible for individuals to grasp all the information relevant to their interests. Since even experts' knowledge is likely to be incomplete, important associations among key biomedical concepts may remain unnoticed in the flood of information. Discovering those implicit, hidden knowledge is called hypothesis discovery. This paper reports our preliminary work on hypothesis discovery, which takes advantage of a syllogistic chain of relations extracted from existing knowledge (i.e., published literature). We consider such chains of relations as implicit patterns or rules to generate potential hypotheses. The generated hypotheses are then ranked according to their plausibility judged from the reliability of the rule which generated the hypothesis and the analogical resemblance between new and existing knowledge. We discuss the validity of the proposed approach on the entire Medline database.