Heterogeneous logistic regression for estimation of subgroup effects on hypertension

Personalized medicine has gained much attention in the past decades, and identifying the effects of factors is essential for personalized preventions and treatments. Hypertension is a major modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease and is influenced by complex factors. In order to decrease the incidence of hypertension effectively, the subjects should be divided into subgroups according to their characteristics. In this study, we proposed to use a heterogeneous logistic regression combined with a concave fusion penalty to analyze the population-based survey data, including common influencing factors of hypertension. The analytic steps include: (1) identifying the most important predictor; (2) estimating subgroup-based heterogeneous effects. In the present context of primary hypertension data, the modeling results showed that the calculated prediction accuracy under our method was greater than 99%, while zero under the classical logistic regression. The findings could provide a practical guide for further individualized measures implementation.