Title: A shared latent space matrix factorisation method for recommending new trial evidence for systematic review updates,
Abstract: Clinical trial registries can be used to monitor the production of trial
evidence and signal when systematic reviews become out of date. However, this
use has been limited to date due to the extensive manual review required to
search for and screen relevant trial registrations. Our aim was to evaluate a
new method that could partially automate the identification of trial
registrations that may be relevant for systematic review updates. We identified
179 systematic reviews of drug interventions for type 2 diabetes, which
included 537 clinical trials that had registrations in ClinicalTrials.gov. We
tested a matrix factorisation approach that uses a shared latent space to learn
how to rank relevant trial registrations for each systematic review, comparing
the performance to document similarity to rank relevant trial registrations.
The two approaches were tested on a holdout set of the newest trials from the
set of type 2 diabetes systematic reviews and an unseen set of 141 clinical
trial registrations from 17 updated systematic reviews published in the
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. The matrix factorisation approach
outperformed the document similarity approach with a median rank of 59 and
recall@100 of 60.9%, compared to a median rank of 138 and recall@100 of 42.8%
in the document similarity baseline. In the second set of systematic reviews
and their updates, the highest performing approach used document similarity and
gave a median rank of 67 (recall@100 of 62.9%). The proposed method was useful
for ranking trial registrations to reduce the manual workload associated with
finding relevant trials for systematic review updates. The results suggest that
the approach could be used as part of a semi-automated pipeline for monitoring
potentially new evidence for inclusion in a review update.