COVID-19 Data Analysis with a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm for Causal Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining plays a crucial role in the medical area in discovering interesting relationships among the attributes of a data set. Traditional association rule mining algorithms such as Apriori, FP growth, or Eclat require considerable computational resources and generate large volumes of rules. Moreover, these techniques depend on user-defined thresholds which can inadvertently cause the algorithm to omit some interesting rules. In order to solve such challenges, we propose an evolutionary multi-objective algorithm based on NSGA-II to guide the mining process in a data set composed of 15.5 million records with official data describing the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. We tested different scenarios optimizing classical and causal estimation measures in four waves, defined as the periods of time where the number of people with COVID-19 increased. The proposed contributions generate, recombine, and evaluate patterns, focusing on recovering promising high-quality rules with actionable cause-effect relationships among the attributes to identify which groups are more susceptible to disease or what combinations of conditions are necessary to receive certain types of medical care.