Pathway Mining

In this chapter, we’ll explore pathway mining, where we use network science and reasoning algorithms to uncover paths that exist within sequential data. Pathways to outcomes are common in both the medical field, where disease progression often follows a pathway from one disease state to another, and the educational field, where course material often builds on prior course material within a degree program such as law or medicine. We’ll consider a simulated example of medical courses leading to student success or failure in a hypothetical medical school to understand which courses may require extra support for struggling students to ensure ultimate program success.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand how to spot problems involving pathways to an outcome of interest, apply advanced reasoning algorithms to find likely pathways within a dataset and interpret the results to intervene at key points in the pathway to a given outcome of interest...