Machine Learning Methods for Verbal Autopsy in Developing Countries

Although the various VA methods do Challenges for Global Health (Varmus et al. 2003) have not predict causes of deaths with vague symptoms as helped to reinforce the need for evidence-based global accurately as laboratory diagnostics can, verbal autopsy health priorities. Accurate health metrics and improved can predict causes of death with distinct symptoms with statistics can provide crucial decision-making inputs that some degree of accuracy (WHO 2007). For some areas of enable more efficient allocation of scarce financial the world verbal autopsies provide the only information resources towards the most pressing health needs (Murray about mortality currently available. Provided they can and Frenk 2008). Mortality statistics are a widely-used match or improve upon the accuracy of physician-coded resource for setting spending priorities, but out of 192 VA and expert algorithms, data-driven methods should be countries worldwide, only 23 have high-quality death used because they require less time from doctors or registration data, and 75 have no cause-specific mortality medical experts, and may provide valid reproducible fraction information at all (King and Lu 2008).