Finding patterns among risk factors and chronic illness can suggest similar causes, provide guidance to improve healthy lifestyles, and give clues for possible treatments for outliers. Prior studies have typically isolated data challenges from single-disease datasets. However, the predictive power of multiple diseases is more helpful in establishing a healthy lifestyle than investigating one disease. Most studies typically focus on single-disease datasets; however, to ensure that health advice is generalized and contemporary, the features that predict the likelihood of many diseases can improve health advice effectiveness when considering the patient's point of view. We construct and present a novel knowledge-based qualitative method to remove redundant features from a dataset and redefine the outliers. The results of our trials upon five annual chronic disease health surveys demonstrate that our Knowledge Graph-based feature selection, when applied to many machine learning and deep learning multi-label classifiers, can improve classification performance. Our methodology is compatible with future directions, such as graph neural networks. It provides clinicians with an efficient process to select the most relevant health survey questions and responses regarding single or many human organ systems.
Keywords: Chronic illness; Feature selection; Knowledge graphs; Risk factors.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.