Bayesian Tensor Decomposition for Clustering Latent Symptom Profiles for Verbal Autopsy Data

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Main Authors: Yu Zhu, Zehang Richard Li
Format: Artículo Open Access
Published: Wiley 2026
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author Yu Zhu
Zehang Richard Li
author_facet Yu Zhu
Zehang Richard Li
Yu Zhu
Zehang Richard Li
collection Wiley Open Access
contents Bayesian Tensor Decomposition for Clustering Latent Symptom Profiles for Verbal Autopsy Data Yu Zhu Zehang Richard Li Statistics in Medicine ABSTRACT Cause‐of‐death data is fundamental for understanding population health trends and inequalities as well as designing and evaluating public health interventions. A significant proportion of global deaths, particularly in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), do not have medically certified causes assigned. In such settings, verbal autopsy (VA) is a widely adopted approach to estimate disease burdens by interviewing caregivers of the deceased. Recently, latent class models have been developed to model the joint distribution of symptoms and perform probabilistic cause‐of‐death assignment. A large number of latent classes are usually needed in order to characterize the complex dependence among symptoms, making the estimated symptom profiles challenging to summarize and interpret. In this paper, we propose a flexible Bayesian tensor decomposition framework that balances the predictive accuracy of the cause‐of‐death assignment task and the interpretability of the latent structures. The key to our approach is to partition symptoms into groups and model the joint distributions of group‐level symptom sub‐profiles. The proposed methods achieve better predictive accuracy than existing VA methods and provide a more parsimonious representation of the symptom distributions. We show our methods provide new insights into the clustering patterns of both symptoms and causes using the PHMRC gold‐standard VA dataset. 10.1002/sim.70475 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
doi_str_mv 10.1002/sim.70475
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license_str_mv http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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spellingShingle Bayesian Tensor Decomposition for Clustering Latent Symptom Profiles for Verbal Autopsy Data
Yu Zhu
Zehang Richard Li
Statistics in Medicine
Bayesian Tensor Decomposition for Clustering Latent Symptom Profiles for Verbal Autopsy Data Yu Zhu Zehang Richard Li Statistics in Medicine ABSTRACT Cause‐of‐death data is fundamental for understanding population health trends and inequalities as well as designing and evaluating public health interventions. A significant proportion of global deaths, particularly in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), do not have medically certified causes assigned. In such settings, verbal autopsy (VA) is a widely adopted approach to estimate disease burdens by interviewing caregivers of the deceased. Recently, latent class models have been developed to model the joint distribution of symptoms and perform probabilistic cause‐of‐death assignment. A large number of latent classes are usually needed in order to characterize the complex dependence among symptoms, making the estimated symptom profiles challenging to summarize and interpret. In this paper, we propose a flexible Bayesian tensor decomposition framework that balances the predictive accuracy of the cause‐of‐death assignment task and the interpretability of the latent structures. The key to our approach is to partition symptoms into groups and model the joint distributions of group‐level symptom sub‐profiles. The proposed methods achieve better predictive accuracy than existing VA methods and provide a more parsimonious representation of the symptom distributions. We show our methods provide new insights into the clustering patterns of both symptoms and causes using the PHMRC gold‐standard VA dataset. 10.1002/sim.70475 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
title Bayesian Tensor Decomposition for Clustering Latent Symptom Profiles for Verbal Autopsy Data
topic Statistics in Medicine
url https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sim.70475