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Exploiting historical registers: Automatic methods for coding c19th and c20th cause of death descriptions to standard classifications

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Dibben_2013_CROS_Exploiting.pdf (175.4Kb)
Date
05/03/2013
Author
Carson, Jamie Kirk
Kirby, Graham Njal Cameron
Dearle, Alan
Williamson, Lee
Garrett, Eilidh
Reid, Alice
Dibben, Christopher John Lloyd
Funder
Economic & Social Research Council
Economic & Social Research Council
Economic & Social Research Council
The Wellcome Trust
Grant ID
RES-161-25-1001-03
ES/K000454/1
ES/K00574X/1
086113/Z/Z08/Z
Keywords
QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
HA Statistics
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Abstract
The increasing availability of digitised registration records presents a significant opportunity for research. Returning to the original records allows researchers to classify descriptions, such as cause of death, to modern medical understandings of illness and disease, rather than relying on contemporary registrars’ classifications. Linkage of an individual’s records together also allows the production of sparse life-course micro-datasets. The further linkage of these into family units then presents the possibility of reconstructing family structures and producing multi-generational studies. We describe work to develop a method for automatically coding to standard classifications the causes of death from 8.3 million Scottish death certificates. We have evaluated a range of approaches using text processing and supervised machine learning, obtaining accuracy from 72%-96% on several test sets. We present results and speculate on further development that may be needed for classification of the full data set.
Citation
Carson , J K , Kirby , G N C , Dearle , A , Williamson , L , Garrett , E , Reid , A & Dibben , C J L 2013 , Exploiting historical registers: Automatic methods for coding c19th and c20th cause of death descriptions to standard classifications . in New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics . Eurostat , http://www.cros-portal.eu/content/ntts-2013-proceedings , pp. 598-607 , New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics (NTTS 2013) , Brussels , Belgium , 5/03/13 . https://doi.org/10.2901/Eurostat.C2013.001
 
conference
 
Publication
New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.2901/Eurostat.C2013.001
Type
Conference item
Rights
© European Communities. Reproduction is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged, save where otherwise stated. http://www.cros-portal.eu/page/legal-notice.
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URL
http://www.cros-portal.eu/content/ntts-2013
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5409

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