Habits vs Environment: What really causes asthma?
This work addresses the need for a comprehensive analysis of asthma risk factors for medical researchers and public health professionals, though it is incremental as it builds on existing EventShop tools.
The paper tackles the problem of determining the relative importance of personal versus environmental risk factors for asthma onset by proposing a framework that analyzes about 400 features from heterogeneous data sources using gradient boosting trees. The results show that the top-ranked risk factors align with general medical consensus, validating the framework's reliability.
Despite considerable number of studies on risk factors for asthma onset, very little is known about their relative importance. To have a full picture of these factors, both categories, personal and environmental data, have to be taken into account simultaneously, which is missing in previous studies. We propose a framework to rank the risk factors from heterogeneous data sources of the two categories. Established on top of EventShop and Personal EventShop, this framework extracts about 400 features, and analyzes them by employing a gradient boosting tree. The features come from sources including personal profile and life-event data, and environmental data on air pollution, weather and PM2.5 emission sources. The top ranked risk factors derived from our framework agree well with the general medical consensus. Thus, our framework is a reliable approach, and the discovered rankings of relative importance of risk factors can provide insights for the prevention of asthma.