Prediction and Factor Extraction of Drug Function by Analyzing Medical Records in Developing Countries

The World Health Organization has declared Bangladesh one of 58 countries facing acute Human Resources for Health (HRH) crisis. Artificial intelligence in healthcare has been shown to be successful for diagnostics. Using machine learning to predict pharmaceutical prescriptions may solve HRH crises. In this study, we investigate a predictive model by analyzing prescription data of 4,543 subjects in Bangladesh. We predict the function of prescribed drugs, comparing three machine-learning approaches. The approaches compare whether a subject shall be prescribed medicine from the 21 most frequently prescribed drug functions. Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) were selected as a way to evaluate and assess prediction models. The results show the drug function with the best prediction performance was oral hypoglycemic drugs, which has an average AUC of 0.962. To understand how the variables affect prediction, we conducted factor analysis based on tree-based algorithms and natural language processing techniques.