An optimization-based approach to patient grouping for acute healthcare in Australia

Abstract

The problem of cluster analysis is formulated as a problem of nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization, and an algorithm for solving the cluster analysis problem based on the nonsmooth optimization techniques is developed. The issues of applying this algorithm to large data sets are discussed and a feature selection procedure is demonstrated. The algorithm is then applied to a hospital data set to generate new knowledge about different patterns of patients resource consumption. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.