Predicting onset of disease progression using temporal disease occurrence networks

•Temporal disease occurrence network is a simple and useful tool to study the structural properties of disease network and progression.•Supervised depth first search is useful to obtain patient clusters with prevalent disease progression.•Forward and backward disease progression reveals highly probable diseases with a higher risk of morbidity progression.•Conditional probability determines the possibility of a disease occurring in the future. Early recognition and prevention are crucial for reducing the risk of disease progression. This study aimed to develop a novel technique based on a temporal disease occurrence network to analyze and predict disease progression. This study used a total of 3.9 million patient records. Patient health records were transformed into temporal disease occurrence networks, and a supervised depth first search was used to find frequent disease sequences to predict the onset of disease progression. The diseases represented nodes in the network and paths between nodes represented edges that co-occurred in a patient cohort with temporal order. The node and edge level attributes contained meta-information about patients’ gender, age group, and identity as labels where the disease occurred. The node and edge level attributes guided the depth first search to identify frequent disease occurrences in specific genders and age groups. The patient history was used to match the most frequent disease occurrences and then the obtained sequences were merged together to generate a ranked list of diseases with their conditional probability and relative risk. The study found that the proposed method had improved performance compared to other methods. Specifically, when predicting a single disease, the method achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.65 and an F1-score of 0.11. When predicting a set of diseases relative to ground truth, the method achieved an AUC of 0.68 and an F1-score of 0.13. The ranked list generated by the proposed method, which includes the probability of occurrence and relative risk score, can provide physicians with valuable information about the sequential development of diseases in patients. This information can help physicians to take preventive measures in a timely manner, based on the best available information.