Knowledge Discovery from Microbiology Data: Many-Sided Analysis of Antibiotic Resistance in Nosocomial Infections

Nosocomial infections and antimicrobial resistance (AR) are highly important problems that impact the morbidity and mortality of hospitalized patients as well as their cost of care. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate our analysis of AR by applying a number of various data mining (DM) techniques to real hospital data. The data for the analysis includes instances of sensitivity of nosocomial infections to antibiotics collected in a hospital over three years 2002-2004. The results of our study show that DM makes it easy for experts to inspect patterns that might otherwise be missed by usual (manual) infection control. However, the clinical relevance and utility of these findings await th…