Major

Data Science

Research Abstract

As the amount of publicly shared data increases,

developing a robust pipeline to stream, store and process data is

critical, as the casual user often lacks the technology, hardware

and/or skills needed to work with such voluminous data. In

this research, the authors employ Amazon EC2 and EMR,

MongoDB, and Spark MLlib to explore 28.5 gigabytes of CMS

Open Payments data in an attempt to identify physicians who

may have a high propensity to act unethically, owing to significant

transfers of wealth from medical companies. A Random Forest

Classifier is employed to predict the top decile of physicians who

have the highest risk of unethical behavior in the following year,

resulting in an F-Score of 91%. The data is also analyzed by

an anomaly detection algorithm that correctly identified a highprofile

case of a physician leaving his prestigious position, as

he failed to disclose anomalously-large transfers of wealth from

medical companies.

Faculty Mentor/Advisor

Paul Intrevado, Diane Woodbridge

Share

COinS
 
Apr 26th, 10:00 AM

Predicting Unethical Physician Behavior At Scale: A Distributed Computing Framework

As the amount of publicly shared data increases,

developing a robust pipeline to stream, store and process data is

critical, as the casual user often lacks the technology, hardware

and/or skills needed to work with such voluminous data. In

this research, the authors employ Amazon EC2 and EMR,

MongoDB, and Spark MLlib to explore 28.5 gigabytes of CMS

Open Payments data in an attempt to identify physicians who

may have a high propensity to act unethically, owing to significant

transfers of wealth from medical companies. A Random Forest

Classifier is employed to predict the top decile of physicians who

have the highest risk of unethical behavior in the following year,

resulting in an F-Score of 91%. The data is also analyzed by

an anomaly detection algorithm that correctly identified a highprofile

case of a physician leaving his prestigious position, as

he failed to disclose anomalously-large transfers of wealth from

medical companies.