Association Rule Mining on National Survey Data: An Analysis of Timely Receipt of Preventive Care or Screening Examinations

Given the current health care environment, there is a growing importance of practicing preventive care to enhance the effectiveness and quality of public health. Applying data mining methods on national survey data provides a practical approach to investigate risk factors that are related to the timely receipt of recommended preventive care. This study is to explore the potential of association rule mining in identifying relevant demographic and other factors, and to assess disparities in preventive care among population subgroups using national estimates.

In our experiments, data were extracted from the cross-sectional, nationally representative 2007 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) Household Component. The target population was the U.S. older adults aged 50 years or over. In developing association rules in the form of if-then rules, we selected 4 preventive care or screening examinations as target variables (consequent; the “then” part): dental checkup, prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, mammogram, and routine health checkup. For antecedent variables (the “if” part) of the rule, we used demographic and other variables including health status variables and access to care variables. For each consequent variable, we first used antecedent variables from each category (e.g., demographics and socioeconomic status), and then significant variables from each category were combined to develop potentially useful association rules. The strength of discovered association rules was evaluated by their support and confidence measures. We also tested varying support and confidence thresholds to detect rare association rules which have low support and high confidence measures. We then used antecedent variables of each selected rule to derive national estimates of the corresponding population subgroup. The findings of our experiments provided useful insights into risk factors that contributed to the timely receipt of preventive care, and also showed interesting population subgroups that demonstrated preventive care disparities among the U.S older adults.