Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2014
College/Unit
Statler College of Engineering and Mining Resources
Department/Program/Center
Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Abstract
Background: Collecting data can be cumbersome and expensive. Lack of relevant, accurate and timely data for research to inform policy may negatively impact public health. The aim of this study was to test if the careful removal of items from two community nutrition surveys guided by a data mining technique called feature selection, can (a) identify a reduced dataset, while (b) not damaging the signal inside that data.
Methods: The Nutrition Environment Measures Surveys for stores (NEMS-S) and restaurants (NEMS-R) were completed on 885 retail food outlets in two counties in West Virginia between May and November of 2011. A reduced dataset was identified for each outlet type using feature selection. Coefficients from linear regression modeling were used to weight items in the reduced datasets. Weighted item values were summed with the error term to compute reduced item survey scores. Scores produced by the full survey were compared to the reduced item scores using a Wilcoxon rank-sum test.
Results: Feature selection identified 9 store and 16 restaurant survey items as significant predictors of the score produced from the full survey. The linear regression models built from the reduced feature sets had R2 values of 92% and 94% for restaurant and grocery store data, respectively.
Conclusions: While there are many potentially important variables in any domain, the most useful set may only be a small subset. The use of feature selection in the initial phase of data collection to identify the most influential variables may be a useful tool to greatly reduce the amount of data needed thereby reducing cost.
Digital Commons Citation
Partington, Susan N.; Papakroni, Vasil; and Menzies, Tim, "Optimizing data collection for public health decisions: a data mining approach" (2014). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 2523.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/2523
Source Citation
Partington, S.N., Papakroni, V. & Menzies, T. Optimizing data collection for public health decisions: a data mining approach. BMC Public Health 14, 593 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-593
Comments
© 2014 Partington et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.