Deep Neural Network to Identify Patients with Alcohol Use Disorder

This paper presents an application of deep neural networks (DNN) to identify patients with Alcohol Use Disorder based on historical electronic health records. Our methodology consists of four stages including data collection, preprocessing, predictive model development, and validation. Data are collected from two sources and labeled into three classes including Normal, Hazardous, and Harmful drinkers. Moreover, problems such as imbalanced classes, noise, and categorical variables were handled. A four-layer fully-connected feedforward DNN architecture was designed and developed to predict Normal, Hazardous, and Harmful drinkers. Results show that our proposed method could successfully classify about 96%, 82%, and 89% of Normal, Hazardous, and Harmful drinkers, respectively, which is better than classical machine learning approaches.