Abstract
The prevalence of health problems during childhood and adolescence is high in developing countries such as Brazil. Social inequality, violence, and malnutrition have strong impact on youth health. To better understand these issues we propose to combine machine-learning methods and graph analysis to build predictive networks applied to the Brazilian National Student Health Survey (PenSE 2015) data, a large dataset that consists of questionnaires filled by the students. By using a combination of gradient boosting machines and centrality hub metric, it was possible to identify potential confounders to be considered when conducting association analyses among variables. The variables were ranked according to their hub centrality to predict the other variables from a directed weighted-graph perspective. The top five ranked confounder variables were “gender”, “oral health care”, “intended education level”, and two variables associated with nutrition habits—“eat while watching TV” and “never eat fast-food”. In conclusion, although causal effects cannot be inferred from the data, we believe that the proposed approach might be a useful tool to obtain novel insights on the association between variables and to identify general factors related to health conditions.
Highlights
Brazil is the country with the fifth-largest population in the world [1], and as a developingLatin American country, public health care is a major issue for the Ministry of Health [2]
We focused on the predictive relation between variables from a multivariate perspective, and we used a combination of machine-learning methods and graph analysis to build predictive networks
The main strength of the method is that the analyses were conducted from a and graph analysis
Summary
Brazil is the country with the fifth-largest population in the world [1], and as a developingLatin American country, public health care is a major issue for the Ministry of Health [2]. Adolescent health is one of the key elements for social progress and economic development, considering that adolescents will become the country’s human resources in the near future To better address these issues, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the Ministry of Health (Secretary of Health Vigilance) joined collaborative efforts to map risk factors and adolescent habits across the whole country. They implemented the National Survey of Students’ Health (PeNSE, from the Portuguese abbreviation), a large-scale community-based survey with approximately. Adolescents are sampled from schools to answer a detailed survey with questions about their health and related matters This is the largest national survey targeting this population and
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
