Exploitation of Clustering Techniques in Transactional Healthcare Data

Healthcare service centres equipped with electronic health systems have improved their resources as well as treatment processes. The dynamic nature of healthcare data of each individual makes it complex and difficult for physicians to manually mediate them; therefore, automatic techniques are essential to manage the quality and standardization of treatment procedures. Exploratory data analysis, patternanalysis and grouping of data is managed using clustering techniques, which work as an unsupervised classification. A number of healthcare applications are developed that use several data mining techniques for classification, clustering and extracting useful information from healthcare data. The challenging issue in this domain is to select adequate data mining algorithm for optimal results. This paper exploits three different clustering algorithms: DBSCAN (Density-Based Clustering), agglomerative hierarchical and k-means in real transactional healthcare data of diabetic patients (taken as case study) to analyse their performance in large and dispersed healthcare data. The best solution of cluster sets among the exploited algorithms is evaluated using clustering quality indexes and is selected to identify the possible subgroups of patients having similar treatment patterns