Chapter 5 - Geometric Representations in Biomedical Informatics: Applications in Automated Text Analysis

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with geometric representations of biomedical data. In it, we discuss how data elements with multiple features can be considered as vectors in a high-dimensional space, enabling the application of distance metrics as a means to estimate their similarity or relatedness for the purpose of information retrieval, exploration, or classification. In terms of applications, the emphasis in this chapter is on the representation of biomedical text. However, the methods are broadly applicable, and examples from other cases of biomedical research will at times be provided to illustrate this point.