Chronic disease prediction using character-recurrent neural network in the presence of missing information

The aim of this study was to predict chronic diseases in individual patients using a character-recurrent neural network (Char-RNN), which is a deep learning model that treats data in each class as a word when a large portion of its input values is missing. An advantage of Char-RNN is that it does not require any additional imputation method because it implicitly infers missing values considering the relationship with nearby data points. We applied Char-RNN to classify cases in the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) VI as normal status and five chronic diseases: hypertension, stroke, angina pectoris, myocardial infarction, and diabetes mellitus. We also employed a multilayer perceptron network for the same task for comparison. The results show higher accuracy for Char-RNN than for the conventional multilayer perceptron model. Char-RNN showed remarkable performance in finding patients with hypertension and stroke. The present study utilized the KNHANES VI data to demonstrate a practical approach to predicting and managing chronic diseases with partially observed information.