Simple evolutionary algorithm for quantifying how medical history factors predict disease outcomes

Abstract

The medical history information contained in electronic health records (EHR) is a valuable and largely untapped data mining source for predicting patient outcomes and thereby improving treatment. This paper presents a simple but novel evolutionary algorithm (EA) for identifying how various medical history and demographic factors predict clinical outcomes. For this initial study, our EA was tested using synthetic data concerning COVID-19 hospitalization rates and we show that the EA results are more informative than logistic regression, neural network, or decision tree results.