Medical expenditure estimation by Bayesian network for lung cancer patients at different severity stages

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality, and its medical expenditure has increased dramatically. Estimating the expenditure for this disease has become an urgent concern of the supporting families, medial institutes, and government. In this study, a conditional Gaussian Bayesian network (CGBN) model was developed to incorporate the comprehensive risk factors to estimate the medical expenditure of a lung cancer patient at different stages. A total of 961 patients were surveyed by the four severity stages of lung cancer. The proposed CGBN model identified the correlation and association of 15 risk factors to the medical expenditure of different severity stages of lung cancer patients. The relationships among the demographic, diagnosed-based, and prior-utilization variables are constructed. The model predicted the lung cancer-related medical expenditure with high accuracy of 32.63%, 50.30%, 50.36%, and 66.58%, respectively for stages 1-4, as compared with the reported models. A greedy search was also applied to find the upper threshold of R², while our model also shows that it approached the upper threshold.