Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

A Multifactorial Obesity Model Developed From Nationwide Public Health Exposome Data And Modern Computational Analyses, Lisaann S. Gittner, Barbara J. Kilbourne, Ravi Vadapalli, Hafiz M.K. Khan, Michael A. Langston

Sociology Faculty Research

Summary

Statement of the problem

Obesity is both multifactorial and multimodal, making it difficult to identify, unravel and distinguish causative and contributing factors. The lack of a clear model of aetiology hampers the design and evaluation of interventions to prevent and reduce obesity.

Methods

Using modern graph-theoretical algorithms, we are able to coalesce and analyse thousands of inter-dependent variables and interpret their putative relationships to obesity. Our modelling is different from traditional approaches; we make no a priori assumptions about the population, and model instead based on the actual characteristics of a population. Paracliques, noise-resistant collections of highly-correlated variables, are …