Exploring Disease Association from the NHANES Data: Data Mining, Pattern Summarization, and Visual Analytics

Finding associations among different diseases is an important task in medical data mining. The NHANES data is a valuable source in exploring disease associations. However, existing studies analyzing the NHANES data focus on using statistical techniques to test a small number of hypotheses. This NHANES data has not been systematically explored for mining disease association patterns. In this regard, this paper proposes a direct disease pattern mining method and an interactive disease pattern mining method to explore the NHANES data. The results on the latest NHANES data demonstrate that these methods can mine meaningful disease associations consistent with the existing knowledge and literatures. Furthermore, this study provides summarization of the data set via a disease influence graph and a disease hierarchical tree.