Cost-Sensitive Diagnosis and Learning Leveraging Public Health Data
This addresses cost and privacy concerns in healthcare data collection, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of feature acquisition costs in health analytics by introducing a health dataset with assigned feature costs and comparing state-of-the-art cost-sensitive methods, showing performance on diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension classification tasks.
Traditionally, machine learning algorithms rely on the assumption that all features of a given dataset are available for free. However, there are many concerns such as monetary data collection costs, patient discomfort in medical procedures, and privacy impacts of data collection that require careful consideration in any real-world health analytics system. An efficient solution would only acquire a subset of features based on the value it provides while considering acquisition costs. Moreover, datasets that provide feature costs are very limited, especially in healthcare. In this paper, we provide a health dataset as well as a method for assigning feature costs based on the total level of inconvenience asking for each feature entails. Furthermore, based on the suggested dataset, we provide a comparison of recent and state-of-the-art approaches to cost-sensitive feature acquisition and learning. Specifically, we analyze the performance of major sensitivity-based and reinforcement learning based methods in the literature on three different problems in the health domain, including diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension classification.