Mutual information: Measuring nonlinear dependence in longitudinal epidemiological data

Alexander L Young, Willem van den Boom, Rebecca A Schroeder, Vijay Krishnamoorthy, Karthik Raghunathan, Hau-Tieng Wu and David B Dunson

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 4, 1-16

Abstract: Given a large clinical database of longitudinal patient information including many covariates, it is computationally prohibitive to consider all types of interdependence between patient variables of interest. This challenge motivates the use of mutual information (MI), a statistical summary of data interdependence with appealing properties that make it a suitable alternative or addition to correlation for identifying relationships in data. MI: (i) captures all types of dependence, both linear and nonlinear, (ii) is zero only when random variables are independent, (iii) serves as a measure of relationship strength (similar to but more general than R2), and (iv) is interpreted the same way for numerical and categorical data. Unfortunately, MI typically receives little to no attention in introductory statistics courses and is more difficult than correlation to estimate from data. In this article, we motivate the use of MI in the analyses of epidemiologic data, while providing a general introduction to estimation and interpretation. We illustrate its utility through a retrospective study relating intraoperative heart rate (HR) and mean arterial pressure (MAP). We: (i) show postoperative mortality is associated with decreased MI between HR and MAP and (ii) improve existing postoperative mortality risk assessment by including MI and additional hemodynamic statistics.

Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284904 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 84904&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0284904

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284904

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().