What do we mean when we say we are clustering multimorbidity?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Seth, Sohan, Lone, Nazir, Peek, Niels, Guthrie, Bruce
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Seth, Sohan
Lone, Nazir
Peek, Niels
Guthrie, Bruce
author_facet Seth, Sohan
Lone, Nazir
Peek, Niels
Guthrie, Bruce
contents Clustering multimorbidity has been a global research priority in recent years. Existing studies usually identify these clusters using one of several popular clustering methods and then explore various characteristics of these clusters, e.g., their genetic underpinning or their sociodemographic drivers, as downstream analysis. These studies make several choices during clustering that are often not explicitly acknowledged in the literature, e.g., whether they are clustering conditions or clustering individuals, and thus, they lead to different clustering solutions. We observe that, in general, clustering multimorbidity might mean different things in different studies, and argue that making these choices more explicit and, more importantly, letting the downstream analysis, or the purpose of identifying multimorbidity clusters, guide these choices, might lead to more transparent and operationalizable multimorbidity clusters. In this study, we discuss various purposes of identifying multimorbidity clusters and build a case for how different purposes can justify the different choices in data and methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_02111
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What do we mean when we say we are clustering multimorbidity?
Seth, Sohan
Lone, Nazir
Peek, Niels
Guthrie, Bruce
Applications
Clustering multimorbidity has been a global research priority in recent years. Existing studies usually identify these clusters using one of several popular clustering methods and then explore various characteristics of these clusters, e.g., their genetic underpinning or their sociodemographic drivers, as downstream analysis. These studies make several choices during clustering that are often not explicitly acknowledged in the literature, e.g., whether they are clustering conditions or clustering individuals, and thus, they lead to different clustering solutions. We observe that, in general, clustering multimorbidity might mean different things in different studies, and argue that making these choices more explicit and, more importantly, letting the downstream analysis, or the purpose of identifying multimorbidity clusters, guide these choices, might lead to more transparent and operationalizable multimorbidity clusters. In this study, we discuss various purposes of identifying multimorbidity clusters and build a case for how different purposes can justify the different choices in data and methods.
title What do we mean when we say we are clustering multimorbidity?
topic Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02111