Overachieving Municipalities in Public Health: A Machine-learning Approach

摘要

Background: Identifying successful public health ideas and practices is a difficult challenge towing to the presence of complex baseline characteristics that can affect health outcomes. We propose the use of machine learning algorithms to predict life expectancy at birth, and then compare health-related characteristics of the under- and overachievers (i.e., municipalities that have a worse and better outcome than predicted, respectively).