Risk prediction for heterogeneous populations with application to hospital admission prediction

There is an increasing need to model risk for large hospital and health care systems that provide services to diverse and complex patients. In this paper co-authored by Drs. Menggang Yu and Maureen Smith, the investigators imposed structural constraints on the importance of variables in predicting outomes such as hospital admission, and demonstrated that their method performs well upon application in hospital admission prediction and validation for the Medicare population of a large health care provider.