An Approach for Incorporating Context in Building Probabilistic Predictive Models.

With the increasing amount of information collected through clinical practice and scientific experimentation, a growing challenge is how to utilize available resources to construct predictive models to facilitate clinical decision making. Clinicians often have questions related to the treatment and outcome of a medical problem for individual patients; however, few tools exist that leverage the large collection of patient data and scientific knowledge to answer these questions. Without appropriate context, existing data that have been collected for a specific task may not be suitable for creating new models that answer different questions.