Completing Missing Prevalence Rates for Multiple Chronic Diseases by Jointly Leveraging Both Intra- and Inter-Disease Population Health Data Correlations

Abstract

Population health data are becoming more and more publicly available on the Internet than ever before. Such datasets offer a great potential for enabling a better understanding of the health of populations, and inform health professionals and policy makers for better resource planning, disease management and prevention across different regions. However, due to the laborious and high-cost nature of collecting such public health data, it is a common place to find many missing entries on these datasets, which challenges the utility of the data and hinders reliable analysis and understanding. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a deep-learning-based approach, called Compressive Population Health (CPH), to infer and recover (to complete) the missing prevalence rate entries of multiple chronic diseases. The key insight of CPH relies on the combined exploitation of both intra-disease and inter-disease correlation opportunities. Specifically, we first propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approach to extract and model both of these two types of correlations, and then adopt a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based prevalence inference model to jointly fuse them to facility the prevalence rates data recovery of missing entries. We extensively evaluate the inference model based on real-world public health datasets publicly available on the Web. Results show that our inference method outperforms other baseline methods in various settings and with a significantly improved accuracy (from 14.8% to 9.1%).