Domain Knowledge Based Hierarchical Feature Selection For 30-Day Hospital Readmission Prediction

Many studies fail to provide models for 30-day hospital re-admission prediction with satisfactory performance due to high dimensionality and sparsity. Efficient feature selection techniques allow better generalization of predictive models and improved interpretability, which is a very important property for applications in health care. We propose feature selection method that exploits hierarchical domain knowledge together with data. The new method is evaluated on predicting 30-day hospital readmission for pediatric patients from California and provides evidence that a knowledge-based approach outperforms traditional methods and that the newly proposed method is competitive with state-of-the-art methods.