Feature Exploration and Causal Inference on Mortality of Epilepsy Patients Using Insurance Claims Data

Approximately 0.5-1% of the global population is afflicted with epilepsy, a neurological disorder characterized by repeated seizures. Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) is a poorly understood complication that claims the lives of nearly 1-in-1000 epilepsy patients every year. This paper aims to explore diagnosis codes, demographic and payment features on mortality of epilepsy patients. We design a mortality prediction model with diagnosis codes and non-diagnosis features extracted from US commercial insurance claims data. We present classification accuracy of 0.91 and 0.85 by using different feature vectors. After analyzing the aforementioned features in prediction model, we extend the work to causal inference between modified diagnosis codes and selected non-diagnosis features. The uplift test of causal inference using three algorithms indicates that a patient is more likely to survive if upgrading from a low-coverage healthcare plan into a high-coverage plan.