Attivio plays a key role in powering Patterns and Predictions’ real-time predictive analytics solution to identify mental health risk factors among U.S. veterans,including suicide.

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The statistics are alarming: suicide rates among U.S. veterans are almost double
those of the general U.S. adult population.1
Reducing the incidence of suicide
among U.S. veterans has proven to be a complex and challenging battle; no
initiative or program to date has worked to reverse this trend. Fortunately, there is
a new ally in veterans’ suicide prevention: predictive analytics technology.
A recent proof-of-concept investigation has yielded promising results using
predictive analytics to pinpoint mental health risk factors and identify potentially
harmful behavior before it occurs. A technology consortium, including Attivio,
funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and in
partnership with Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center on this critical initiative.
The project is led by Attivio’s partner, Patterns and Predictions, a leader in event-
driven analytics, founded by Chris Poulin, who first focused on the military’s
growing suicide problem along with Dartmouth College researchers in 2010. Within
a year, Poulin secured a $1.7 million DARPA contract to develop a mobile app
monitoring mental health indicators in a control group of combat-exposed veterans.
Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine integrates multiple social, online and mobile data
sources, and provides key functionality upon ingestion of each item of content,
including entity extraction and other advanced text analytics.
AIE then enables ad hoc data queries from the Patterns and Predictions application
to analyze a patient’s risk for harmful behavior over time; including, for example,
finding patients whose last document processed yielded a suicidality score higher
than the previous time series average score. AIE automatically joins all related data
and/or text-based content, with no advance data modeling required.
In a precursor investigation conducted with Dartmouth Medical Center and the U.S.
Veterans Administration, completed in 2013, the predictive analytics and text-
mining methods of Patterns and Predictions, Attivio, and also Cloudera produced
statistically significant (consistent accuracies of 65% or more) in predicting
suicidality risk among the veteran control group.
The consortium is now providing technology for “Phase 2”: a “scaled-up” test
enabling opt-in participation from more than 100,000 U.S. veterans. Officially
known as The Durkheim Project2
,specific data collected will include social
networking profiles such as Facebook, as well as mobile information; including user
location, de-identified text messaging and content. This Big Data initiative is a tightly
integrated effort with one objective: suicidality prediction at scale.
“The promise of [The Durkheim Project] is in its ability to collect and monitor a
diverse repository of complex data, and then to conduct a real-time triage of actions
upon detection of a critical event,” said Poulin. “The next generation of predictive
analytics tools gives scientific and clinical investigators new resources… and
potential patients hope.”
Attivio is honored to play a key technical role in enabling Patterns and Prediction’s
predictive analytics in order to, in Poulin’s words, “… to help solve this complicated
puzzle and reduce suicide risk, both nationally and internationally.”
Active Intelligence Engine® (AIE®)
Case Study: The Durkheim Project
© 2013 Attivio, Inc. All rights reserved. Attivio and Active
Intelligence Engine are trademarks of Attivio, Inc. All other
names are trademarks of their respective companies.
1
Source: TIME Magazine cover story, July 23, 2012.
2
At this time, the medical study associated with The
Durkheim Project (Dartmouth CPHS #23781) is authorized
as observation only and non-interventional.
This material is based upon work supported by the Defense
Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) and Space
Warfare Systems Center Pacific under Contract N66001-11-
4006. Also supported by, the Intelligence Advanced
Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via the Department of
Interior National Business Center contract number
N10PC20221. The opinions, findings and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are those of
the authors(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the Defense Advance Research Program Agency (DARPA)
and the Space Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific,
IARPA, DOI/NBC, or the U.S. Government.
Attivio AIE plays a key role in
powering Patterns and
Predictions’ real-time
predictive analytics solution to
identify mental health risk
factors among U.S. veterans,
including suicide.
“Attivio’s Active
Intelligence Engine offers a
schema-less index,
patented JOIN technology,
and advanced text
analytics that our project
has relied on time and
again."
– Chris Poulin
Founder & Principal Partner
Patterns and Predictions