Assessing the relative importance of social determinants of health in malaria and anemia classification based on machine learning techniques

Boubacar Sow*, Hamid Mukhtar, Hafiz Farooq Ahmad, Hiroki Suguri

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Disparate types of data including biological and environmental have been used in supervised learning to predict a specific disease outcome. However, social determinants of health, which have been explored very little, promise to be significant predictors of public health problems such as malaria and anemia among children. We considered studying their contribution power in malaria and anemia predictions based on Variable Importance in Projection (VIP). This innovative method has potential advantages as it analyzes the impact of independent variables on disease prediction. In addition, we applied five machine learning algorithms to classify both diseases, using social determinants of health data, and compared their results. Of them all, artificial neural networks gave the best results of 94.74% and 84.17% accuracy for malaria and anemia prediction, respectively. These results are consistent and reflect the significance of non-medical factors in disease prediction.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)229-241
Number of pages13
JournalInformatics for Health and Social Care
Volume45
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Jul 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the support of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) through its Master’s Degree and Internship Program of African Business Education Initiative for Youth (ABE Initiative).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Taylor & Francis.

Keywords

  • anemia
  • DHS
  • Machine learning
  • malaria
  • Senegal
  • social determinants of health
  • variable importance in projection (VIP)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health Informatics
  • Nursing (miscellaneous)
  • Health Information Management

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