Predictive Analysis of Diabetes Dedicated Social Networks

Summary

According to the National Diabetes Statistics Report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention released in 2017, 30.3 million people in the United States have diabetes mellitus (diabetes for short), a number that makes up 9.4% of the country’s population. Diabetes remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States and has incurred hundreds of billion dollars of economic loss (estimated to be $245 billion). In the face of such alarming statistics, the American Diabetes Association is treating diabetes as an epidemic that is projected to affect one in three Americans by 2050.

As the population of people with diabetes continues to grow, various online social networks dedicated to this disease have been emerging. The popularity of these networks can be attributed to the positive effects that they could have on patients in terms of forming support groups, exchanging personal experience, seeking help from one another, sharing news pertinent to diabetes, etc. To date, the state of practice of these diabetes dedicated social networks has been essentially devoted to such exploratory tasks, with each social network operating on its own. Despite the success of such practice, the predictive connection between a patient’s social activities on these networks and his/her measurements of biomarkers largely remains unknown.

The PI proposes a paradigm shift for diabetes dedicated social networks, from exploration to prediction. The overall goal of this project is to harness diabetes patients’ online social behaviors from multiple networks to predict their biomarker measurements. It consists of four complementary research thrusts, including (1) comprehensive social behavior feature extraction, (2) diabetes biomarker measurements extraction and densification, (3) connection between social behaviors and diabetes biomarkers, and (4) algorithmic and clinical evaluations.

Publications

Book

Journals

Conferences

Source Code