Predictive healthcare analytics – state of the art

As we touched upon in Chapter 3, Machine Learning Foundations, healthcare is no stranger to complex risk factor assessments. For almost every major disease, one can find several risk-scoring models that are used widely by physicians to assess the risk of having a disease or suffering morbidity/mortality from that disease. When we use the term "risk score," we are largely referring to criterion tables, in which risk factors are allotted point values, and the points for all of the risk factors are summed to give an overall risk based on the total. These scoring systems are used widely in medicine; interestingly, many of them are based on research involving logistic regression models (similar to the one developed in Chapter 7, Making Predictive Models in Healthcare). The crucial question of the last several decades...