This Thursday at Change we will be hosting a talk by Abraham Flaxman about computer coded verbal autopsy in resource-poor environments. Abraham Flaxman is a computer scientist hiding out in the Global Health Department at the University of Washington. He was trained in the theoretical aspects of randomized algorithms, but now spends his days measuring population health with statistical models. Abie blogs about applications of computer science to global health at http://healthyalgorithms.wordpress.com.
TALK ABSTRACT:**** Cause-specific mortality data is critical information for public health decision-making, but in many areas of the world it is not routinely recorded. In the past several decades, Verbal Autopsy (VA) has emerged as an interview-based approach to fill the gap. Until recently, however, the methods for implementing and analyzing VA were costly, time-consuming, and not validated. The Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC) changed this, however, through a recently completed, multisite validation study, which meticulously collected over 10,000 VA interviews for which the underlying cause of death was known with near certainty (aka ?Labeled Data?). Since the majority of the PHMRC researchers had never heard of *machine learning* before I showed up, I was able to dazzle them with my basic knowledge of some off-the-shelf computer science technology. However, as we dug deeper, we found that even measuring how well a VA analysis method performs is non-trivial. Many, many work hours later, we have now wrapped up an analysis, which was recently published in a special issue of Population Health Metrics (http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/series/verbal_autopsy). In this talk, I will tell you about the verbal autopsy interview, the PHMRC validation study, our new metrics to quantify the quality of VA analysis methods, and the results of the "horserace" of analytic methods that we ran, where we found that a variant of the Random Forest classifier yields the highest quality results, better even than human experts. Please join us on Thursday for sandwiches, and to learn more computer coded verbal autopsy! *What:* Abraham Flaxman on Computer Coded Verbal Autopsy: measuring cause-specific mortality with machine learning *When:* Thursday, October 6th at noon *Where:* Paul Allen Center, Room CSE 203 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/private/change/attachments/20111004/03108bcd/attachment.html>
