An analysis of Demographic and Dietary Data with an Oral Health Approach: A Preliminary Study using Genetic Algorithms

Abstract

Oral health is one of the main components in the quality of life of people, since it is a determining factor in general health that affects the risk of suffering from other conditions, such as chronic diseases. Dental caries is the condition that most affects oral health worldwide, and occurs in about 90 % of people. The high prevalence in dental caries is caused by the diverse elements that interact simultaneously in their favor, such as the nutritional and socioeconomic elements. Based on this problem, this study proposes the analysis of a series of dietetic and demographic features compiled by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2013 -2014, in order to obtain a model that allows the automatic classification of subjects according to their oral health status, presence or absence / restorations of caries. The methodology was carried out in three steps, starting with a data preprocessing, followed by a feature selection using a genetic algorithm and a final validation through a statistical analysis. The developed model is made up of five features (of the initial 188), and reached an area under the curve of 0.748, which is a statistically significant value. According to the results obtained, it was possible to conclude that the proposed model presents a preliminary result for the development of a low-cost support tool that helps the diagnosis of dental caries and the reduction of this condition.