Regularization-Based Bootstrap Ranking Model: Identifying Healthcare Indicators Among All Level Income Economies

This study considers the problem of uncertainty of concurrent variables selection among a potential set of healthcare expenditure predictors. It evaluates two regularization (shrinkage) methods: Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) and Elastic Net (ENET). To improve the accuracy of identifying important and relevant predictors of healthcare cost, the present study proposes a new methodology in the form of a bootstrapped-regularized regression with percentile rankings. A simulation study under various scenarios was implemented to learn the performance of the proposed methodology. The proposed methodology was applied to healthcare expenditure data for all level income economies: lower-income, lower-middle-income, upper-middle-income, and high-income.