A Bayesian Network Model of the Relationships between Chronic Disease Indicators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction We previous developed an informatics platform to: 1) generate large numbers of indicators of chronic conditions and determinants from heterogeneous sources, 2) present indicators in context of known causal relationships. However, the causality was defined by expert-consensus and only concerning direction. Quantitative estimates of causal effects are needed to drive public health decision-making.
 Objectives and ApproachThe objective of this work is to quantify the strength of the relationships between chronic disease indicators through empirical analysis of data for a defined population.
 Eight chronic diseases were explored and the individual data were obtained from linked administrative data for one million randomly sampled Montréal residents. We use Bayesian networks (BN) with our causal model based on expert consensus as a prior for the structure of the BN. In addition, we compare two networks estimated separately from individual-level data and data aggregated at the regional level, the latter being most commonly available to public health agencies.
 ResultsBNs were developed using constraint-based and score-based algorithms for structure learning, and maximum likelihood for parameter estimation. We found that the BN structures and parameters learned from individual-level data differed from the one estimated from data aggregated by community health centers. Specifically, the BN structure learned from individual data contained 9 more arcs between indicators and tened to fit the data better (the Bayesian factor between two network structures was 25.55), however, the results from the aggregated data matched our prior understanding of epidemiological knowledge more closely.
 Conclusion/ImplicationsConclusion: We compared BNs built using different resolutions of data as means to describe patterns among indicators for a defined population. This strategy for interpreting indicators combines prior domain knowledge with data and represents an initial step towards an intelligent decision-support tool for public health practitioners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".