Machine Learning Methods for Prediction of Physical System Behavior

The advancement and marked increase in the use of computing devices in health care for large scale and personal medical use has transformed the field of medicine and health care into a data rich domain. This surge in the availability of data has allowed domain experts to investigate, study and discover inherent patterns in diseases from new perspectives and in turn, further the field of medicine. Storage and analysis of this data in real time aids in enhancing the response time and efficiency of doctors and health care specialists. However, due to the time critical nature of most life- threatening diseases, there is a growing need to make informed decisions prior to the occurrence of any fatal outcome. Alongside time sensitivity, analyzing data specific to diseases and their effects on an individual basis leads to more efficient prognosis and rapid deployment of cures. The primary challenge in addressing both of these issues arises from the time varying and time sensitive nature of the data being studied and in the ability to successfully predict anomalous events using only observed data.This dissertation introduces adaptive machine learning algorithms that aid in the prediction of anomalous situations arising due to abnormalities present in patients diagnosed with certain types of diseases. Emphasis is given to the adaptation and development of algorithms based on an individual basis to further the accuracy of all predictions made. The main objectives are to learn the underlying representation of the data using empirical methods and enhance it using domain knowledge. The learned model is then utilized as a guide for statistical machine learning methods to predict the occurrence of anomalous events in the near future. Further enhancement of the learned model is achieved by means of tuning the objective function of the algorithm to incorporate domain knowledge. Along with anomaly forecasting using multi-modal data, this dissertation also investigates the use of univariate time series data towards the prediction of onset of diseases using Bayesian nonparametrics.