Vital and Health Statistics Commons^™

Comparative Machine Learning Models For Disease Risk Prediction, Mercy Mawusi Agbley

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Accurate prediction of disease outcomes is crucial for improving clinical decision-making and enabling early intervention. This study compares the performance of various statistical and machine learning models for clinical risk prediction using two healthcare datasets: diabetic retinopathy and heart disease. The models assessed include Logistic Regression, LASSO, k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Neural Networks, Random Forests, Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM), and a stacked ensemble model. Prior to modeling, datasets were split into train and test sets. Standardization was applied to numeric features whilst categorical features were one-hot encoded. These transformations were later applied to the test set. Principal …

A Comparative Study Of Classification Methods For Healthcare Analytics, Xueting Zhao

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a comparative study of logistic regression, Linear Discriminant Analy- sis (LDA), and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA) for binary classification in healthcare analytics, integrating theoretical derivation, simulation, and real-data application. A facto- rial simulation study crosses the covariance structure (equal vs. unequal), predictor correla- tion (ρ ∈ {0, 0.5, 0.9}), dimensionality (p ∈ {2, 5, 10}) and sample size (n ∈ {50, 100, 200}) across 54 scenarios with 1,000 Monte Carlo replicates each. Three main findings emerge. Logistic regression and LDA are nearly interchangeable when the assumption of equal-covariance holds. QDA achieves substantially better discrimi- nation when class-specific …

Third Ward Casper 2023 Final Report, Zuri Dale, Vishnu Nepal, Debra Maxwell, Ashlee Young

COVID Research

The 2023 Third Ward CASPER Final Report conducted by Texas Southern University (TSU) and the Houston Health Department assessed public health conditions in Houston's Third Ward community. The initiative utilized the Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER) methodology to gather household-based data, informing public health decisions, emergency responses, and future resource allocation.

Objective and Key Findings: The mission aimed to assess health needs, promote health resources, and build community relationships. Notable findings include that over 36% of households reported hypertension, while 19% experienced poor mental health. Access barriers to healthcare persisted, particularly due to lack of insurance. Nearly …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Dynamic Prediction For Alternating Recurrent Events Using A Semiparametric Joint Frailty Model, Jaehyeon Yun

Statistical Science Theses and Dissertations

Alternating recurrent events data arise commonly in health research; examples include hospital admissions and discharges of diabetes patients; exacerbations and remissions of chronic bronchitis; and quitting and restarting smoking. Recent work has involved formulating and estimating joint models for the recurrent event times considering non-negligible event durations. However, prediction models for transition between recurrent events are lacking. We consider the development and evaluation of methods for predicting future events within these models. Specifically, we propose a tool for dynamically predicting transition between alternating recurrent events in real time. Under a flexible joint frailty model, we derive the predictive probability of …

Improving The Quality And Design Of Retrospective Clinical Outcome Studies That Utilize Electronic Health Records, Oliwier Dziadkowiec, Jeffery Durbin, Vignesh Jayaraman Muralidharan, Megan Novak, Brendon Cornett

HCA Healthcare Journal of Medicine

Electronic health records (EHRs) are an excellent source for secondary data analysis. Studies based on EHR-derived data, if designed properly, can answer previously unanswerable clinical research questions. In this paper we will highlight the benefits of large retrospective studies from secondary sources such as EHRs, examine retrospective cohort and case-control study design challenges, as well as methodological and statistical adjustment that can be made to overcome some of the inherent design limitations, in order to increase the generalizability, validity and reliability of the results obtained from these studies.

Statistical Modeling Of Influenza-Like-Illness In Montana Using Spatial And Temporal Methods, Benjamin A. Stark

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Studying air pollution and public health has been a historically important question in science. It has long been hypothesized that severe air pollution conditions lead to negative implications in basic human health. Primarily, areas thats are prone to severe degrees of human pollution are the focus of such studies. Such research relating to less populated areas are scarce, and this scarcity raises the question of how such pollution dynamics (human-made and natural) influence human health in more rural areas.

The aim of this study is to explore this hole in research; in particular we explore possible links between air pollution …

Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis: Tuberculosis, Tnfα Inhibitors, And Crohn's Disease, Brent L. Cao

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Inflammation is often a protective reaction against harmful foreign agents. However, in many disease conditions, the mechanisms behind the inflammatory response are poorly understood. Often times, the inflammation causes adverse effects, such as joint pain, abdominal pain, fever, fatigue, and loss of appetite. Thus, many treatments aim to inhibit the inflammatory response in order to control adverse symptoms. Such treatments include TNFα inhibitors. However, a major risk associated with drugs inhibiting tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) is serious infection, including tuberculosis (TB).

Anti-TNFα therapy is used to treat patients with Crohn’s disease, for which the risk of tuberculosis may be …

Mechanistic Mathematical Models: An Underused Platform For Hpv Research, Marc Ryser, Patti Gravitt, Evan R. Myers

Global Health Faculty Publications

Health economic modeling has become an invaluable methodology for the design and evaluation of clinical and public health interventions against the human papillomavirus (HPV) and associated diseases. At the same time, relatively little attention has been paid to a different yet complementary class of models, namely that of mechanistic mathematical models. The primary focus of mechanistic mathematical models is to better understand the intricate biologic mechanisms and dynamics of disease. Inspired by a long and successful history of mechanistic modeling in other biomedical fields, we highlight several areas of HPV research where mechanistic models have the potential to advance the …

Models For Hsv Shedding Must Account For Two Levels Of Overdispersion, Amalia Magaret

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

We have frequently implemented crossover studies to evaluate new therapeutic interventions for genital herpes simplex virus infection. The outcome measured to assess the efficacy of interventions on herpes disease severity is the viral shedding rate, defined as the frequency of detection of HSV on the genital skin and mucosa. We performed a simulation study to ascertain whether our standard model, which we have used previously, was appropriately considering all the necessary features of the shedding data to provide correct inference. We simulated shedding data under our standard, validated assumptions and assessed the ability of 5 different models to reproduce the …

The Impact Of Being Born With Cleft And Cleft Reparative Surgery On Overall Health And Speech Outcomes, Khatansuudal Evsanaa

Master's Theses

Orofacial cleft is one of the most common and treatable birth defects in the world. If left untreated, orofacial cleft can impair normal speech development, growth, and could lead to a number of health consequences later in life. The main motivation of the study is to measure the impact of being born with cleft and the cleft reparative surgery on overall speech and health cleft for teenagers in India using difference-in-differences approach along with household fixed effects method. An overall health outcome was measured using height, weight, grip strength and BMI, and the speech acceptability was measured using a “Universal …