rural kenya and uganda
Machine learning to identify persons at high-risk of HIV acquisition in rural Kenya and Uganda
Between 2013-2017, 75% of residents in 16 communities in the SEARCH Study tested annually for HIV. In this population, we evaluated three strategies for using demographic factors to predict the one-year risk of HIV seroconversion: (1) membership in 1 known "Risk Group" (e.g., young woman or HIV-infected spouse); (2) a "Model-based" risk score constructed with logistic regression; (3) a "Machine Learning" risk score constructed with the Super Learner algorithm. We hypothesized Machine Learning would identify high-risk individuals more efficiently (fewer persons targeted for a fixed sensitivity) and with higher sensitivity (for a fixed number of persons targeted) than either other approach.