Title
Statistical methods for constructing disease comorbidity networks from longitudinal inpatient data.
Abstract
Tools from network science can be utilized to study relations between diseases. Different studies focus on different types of inter-disease linkages. One of them is the comorbidity patterns derived from large-scale longitudinal data of hospital discharge records. Researchers seek to describe comorbidity relations as a network to characterize pathways of disease progressions and to predict future risks. The first step in such studies is the construction of the network itself, which subsequent analyses rest upon. There are different ways to build such a network. In this paper, we provide an overview of several existing statistical approaches in network science applicable to weighted directed networks. We discuss the differences between the null models that these models assume and their applications. We apply these methods to the inpatient data of approximately one million people, spanning approximately 17 years, pertaining to the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area. We discuss the differences in the structure of the networks built by different methods, and different features of the comorbidity relations that they extract. We also present several example applications of these methods.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s41109-018-0101-4
Applied Network Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Weighted networks,Null model,Comorbidity,Disease networks,Centrality
Gerontology,Disease,Comorbidity,Medicine
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
3
1
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Babak Fotouhi112.75
Naghmeh Momeni243.87
Maria A. Riolo351.42
David Buckeridge4152.42