Can We Classify the Participants of a Longitudinal Epidemiological Study from Their Previous Evolution?

Medical research can greatly benefit from advances in data mining. We propose a mining approach for cohort analysis in a longitudinal population-based epidemiological study, and show that modelling and exploiting the evolution of cohort participants over time improves classification quality towards an outcome (a disease). Our mining workflow encompasses steps for tracing the evolution of the cohort participants and for using evolution features in classification. We show that our approach separates better between classes and that change in the values of variables is predictive. We report on results for the liver disorder hepatic steatosis (high fat accumulation in the liver), but our approach is appropriate for classification of longitudinal epidemiological data on further disorders.