Deployment of a Phenotypic Characterization System for Effective Identification of the Onset of Asthma Disease

Abstract

Background Essentially, machine learning techniques help with clinical decision-making by forecasting prediction results based on recent and historical data, which are frequently found in carefully chosen clinical data repositories. In order to uncover hidden patterns in the data, machine learning applies sophisticated analytical techniques that conduct an exploratory analysis while constructing prediction models to support clinical judgment. Objective To effectively identify asthmatics in two distinct cohorts representing India's rural and urban populations by adopting a phenotypic characterization approach. Methods Cross-sectional and categorical in design, the data represent the two populations, with clinical history information emphasizing clinical symptoms and patterns defining the condition. The method adopts a hybrid approach since it uniquely blends the unsupervised and supervised learning techniques to explore the advantages of both. The clustering data emphasizing the phenotypic characteristics of asthma is input to the classifier, and the performance of the classifier was continuously monitored for significant improvement in the results. Results Asthma disease outcome predictions made by the hybrid decision support system were quite accurate, with classification accuracy reaching up to 85.1% and 95.3% for the two datasets, respectively. Conclusion Since asthma is a heterogeneous disease with multiple subtypes, employing clustering information in the form of cluster evaluation scores as an input parameter to the classifiers can effectively predict disease outcomes.