Mining adverse events of dietary supplements from product labels by topic modeling

The adverse events of the dietary supplements should be subject to scrutiny due to their growing clinical application and consumption among U.S. adults. An effective method for mining and grouping the adverse events of the dietary supplements is to evaluate product labeling for the rapidly increasing number of new products available in the market. In this study, the adverse events information was extracted from the product labels stored in the Dietary Supplement Label Database (DSLD) and analyzed by topic modeling techniques, specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Among the 50 topics generated by LDA, eight topics were manually evaluated, with topic relatedness ranging from 58.8% to 100% on the product level, and 57.1% to 100% on the ingredient level. Five out of these eight topics were coherent groupings of the dietary supplements based on their adverse events. The results demonstrated that LDA is able to group supplements with similar adverse events based on the dietary supplement labels. Such information can be potentially used by consumers to more safely use dietary supplements.