Analysis of False Positive Errors of an Acute Respiratory Infection Text Classifier due to Contextual Features

Text classifiers have been used for biosurveillance tasks to identify patients with diseases or conditions of interest. When compared to a clinical reference standard of 280 cases of Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI), a text classifier consisting of simple rules and NegEx plus string matching for specific concepts of interest produced 569 (4%) false positive (FP) cases. Using instance level manual annotation we estimate the prevalence of contextual attributes and error types leading to FP cases. Errors were due to (1) Deletion errors from abbreviations, spelling mistakes and missing synonyms (57%); (2) Insertion errors from templated document structures such as check boxes, and lists of signs and symptoms (36%) and; (3) Substitution errors from irrelevant concepts and alternate meanings for the same word (6%). We demonstrate that specific concept attributes contribute to false positive cases. These results will inform modifications and adaptations to improve text classifier performance.