Flexible Distribution-Based Regression Models for Count Data: Application to Medical Diagnosis

Abstract

Data mining techniques have been successfully utilized in different applications of significant fields, including medical research. With the wealth of data available within the health-care systems, there is a lack of practical analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. The complexity of medical data that is unfavorable for most models is a considerable challenge in prediction. The ability of a model to perform accurately and efficiently in disease diagnosis is extremely significant. Thus, the model must be selected to fit the data better, such that the learning from previous data is most efficient, and the diagnosis of the disease is highly accurate. This work is motivated by the limited number of regression analysis tools for multivariate counts in the literature. We propose two regression models for count data based on flexible distributions, namely, the multinomial Beta-Liouville and multinomial scaled Dirichlet, and evaluated the proposed models in the problem of disease diagnosis. The performance is evaluated based on the accuracy of the prediction which depends on the nature and complexity of the dataset. Our results show the efficiency of the two proposed regression models where the prediction performance of both models is competitive to other previously used regression models for count data and to the best results in the literature.