Plenary Lecture

Bayesian Network Approach to Health Informatics: Its Performance and Implications

Professor Kun Chang Lee
Professor of MIS
Director of Health Mining Research Institute
SKKU Business School, Sungkyunkwan University
Republic of Korea
E-mail: kunchanglee@gmail.com

Abstract: Health informatics has received a great deal of attentions from both practitioners and academicians due to its huge impact on people's wellness and health policy. However, it has still suffered from lack of sophisticated information technology theory to fulfill rising demands in accuracy and timeliness of health-related policies in many advanced and developing countries. Furthermore, health problems and issues are plagued by many types of complicated causalities among factors affecting health performance. Therefore, to fill the research void like this, I suggest Bayesian network theory as an effective and robust alterative. To show performance of the Bayesian network, I used six years of KNHANES (Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) dataset (2008~2013) to apply the Bayesian network to investigate how the depression in the elderly is influenced by a number of related explanatory variables such as demographic factors, objective & subjective health-related well-being factors. I could derive a set of useful and meaningful rules from doing a number of what-if and goal-seeking simulations with the resulted Bayesian network models. Through a series of structured interview with health professionals, I found that the causal rules obtained from the Bayesian network possess a great deal of implications for the health practitioners and researchers as well. I hope that this study may shed more practical lights on future studies on health informatics focusing on the usage of IT (information technology).

Brief Biography of the Speaker: Dr. Kun Chang Lee is a full professor of MIS at SKKU Business School in Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea. He is a Distinguished Professor holding SKKU Fellowship. He received his PhD degree in artificial intelligence-based decision making MIS from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). He is on the editorial board at several international journals such as Online Information Review (SSCI), Scientia (SCIE), Journal of Universal Computer Science (SCIE), and Information (SCIE). He conducted as a guest editor in Decision Support Systems, Online Information Review (SSCI), Electronic Commerce Research and Applications (SSCI), and Computers in Human Behavior (SSCI). He has presented papers regularly in a number of prestigious international conferences like HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences), AMCIS (Americas Conference on Information Systems), and ICIS (International Conference on Information Systems). Professor Lee is an internationally recognized authority on decision making & support, ubiquitous computing, intelligent systems, creativity science, human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction, and health mining. His publication records include over 200 articles in scholarly and professional journals. Refer to http://scholar.google.co.kr/citations?user=i2B1Rj8AAAAJ&hl=en for more details on Professor Lee's academic records. He has contributed to a number of international conferences as a program committee member, including CONTEXT (International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context), ACIIDS (Asia Conference on Intelligent Information and Database), WORLDCOMP (World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing), UCMA (International Conference Ubiquitous Computing and Multimedia Applications), UBICOMM (International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies), PACIS (Pacific Conference on Information Systems), IASTED International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Applications, International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Control, International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication, IASTED International Conference on Computational Intelligence, International Workshop on Improved Mobile User Experience (IMUx), and IADIS International Conference on Information Systems, among others.