Presented are systems and methods that estimate the strength of a relationship between elements gathered from online and/or offline information sources by estimating the trustworthiness both of the gathered data and the information sources from which the data originates. In one exemplary application, the relatedness between co-occurring symptom and disease terms collected from information sources, such as health-related online databases, is iteratively evaluated based on the trustworthiness of symptom-disease pairings and the trustworthiness of the information sources themselves. In various embodiments of the present disclosure, an objective function is used to extract a knowledge base that aids in identifying a potential relationship between a set of given symptoms provided by a user of an online healthcare service and co-occurring disease terms, such that a likely disease may be inferred from the set of symptoms.
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