A Natural Language Processing Approach to Support Biomedical Data Harmonization: Leveraging Large Language Models

Biomedical research requires large, diverse samples to produce unbiased results. Automated methods for matching variables across datasets can accelerate this process. Research in this area has been limited, primarily focusing on lexical matching and ontology based semantic matching. We aimed to develop new methods, leveraging large language models (LLM) and ensemble learning, to automate variable matching. Methods: We utilized data from two GERAS cohort (European and Japan) studies to develop variable matching methods. We first manually created a dataset by matching 352 EU variables with 1322 candidate JP variables, where matched variable pairs were positive and unmatched pairs were negative instances. Using this dataset, we developed and evaluated two types of natural language processing (NLP) methods, which matched variables based on variable labels and definitions from data dictionaries: (1) LLM-based and (2) fuzzy matching. We then developed an ensemble-learning method, using the Random Forest model, to integrate individual NLP methods. RF was trained and evaluated on 50 trials. Each trial had a random split (4:1) of training and test sets, with the model's hyperparameters optimized through cross-validation on the training set. For each EU variable, 1322 candidate JP variables were ranked based on NLP-derived similarity scores or RF's probability scores, denoting their likelihood to match the EU variable. Ranking performance was measured by top-n hit ratio (HRn) and mean reciprocal rank (MRR). Results:E5 performed best among individual methods, achieving 0.90 HR-30 and 0.70 MRR. RF performed better than E5 on all metrics over 50 trials (P less than 0.001) and achieved an average HR 30 of 0.98 and MRR of 0.73. LLM-derived features contributed most to RF's performance. One major cause of errors in automatic variable matching was ambiguous variable definitions within data dictionaries.