MAPS is a cross-disciplinary project, spanning the fields of public health, epidemiology and computer science. It is a collaborative project between Kristiania University College and the University of Warwick, in the UK. There is some discordance between parents’ and children’s own perceptions of childrens' own quality of life. The aims of the project are to model quality of life, and also academic performance, in school children. We will have access to data in an ongoing quasi-experimental study, and this nested study is a secondary analysis of the same data. Potential predictive variables (all anonymised) span demographics, lifestyle, biological, and sociological domains.
We also have a methodological aim in that we plan to compare traditional parametric modelling approaches with several non-parametric machine learning algorithms.
The research is timely in that machine learning algorithms are currently showing promise in other areas, but it is not yet clear whether these can outperform regression approaches in medium to large health datasets.
