Latent Factor Decomposition Model: Applications for Questionnaire Data
Connor J. McLaughlin, Efi G. Kokkotou, Jean Anne King, Lisa Ann Conboy, Ali Yousefi · 2021 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC) · 2021
The analysis of clinical questionnaire data comes with many inherent challenges. These challenges include the handling of data with missing fields, as well as the overall interpretation of a dataset with many fields of different scales and forms. While numerous methods have been developed to address these challenges, they are often not robust, statistically sound, or easily interpretable. Here, we propose a latent factor modeling framework that extends the principal component analysis for both categorical and quantitative data with missing elements. The model simultaneously provides the principal components (basis) and each patients' projections on these bases in a latent space. We show an application of our modeling framework through Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) symptoms, where we find correlations between these projections and other standardized patient symptom scales. This latent factor model can be easily applied to different clinical questionnaire datasets for clustering analysis and interpretable inference.