Post-marketing Drug Safety Evaluation Using Data Mining Based on FAERS

Healthcare is going through a big data revolution. The amount of data generated by healthcare is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. Therefore, efficient and effective data processing methods are required to transform data into information. In addition, applying statistical analysis can transform the information into useful knowledge. We developed a data mining method that can uncover new knowledge in this enormous field for clinical decision making while generating scientific methods and hypotheses. The proposed pipeline can be generally applied to a variety of data mining tasks in medical informatics. For this study, we applied the proposed pipeline for post-marketing surveillance on drug safety using FAERS, the data warehouse created by FDA. We used 14 kinds of neurology drugs to illustrate our methods. Our result indicated that this approach can successfully reveal insight for further drug safety evaluation.