Rui Zhang and Jue Hou Receive Award for Risk Modeling Project
The University of Minnesota received a $435,723 award from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to develop risk prediction models for minority patients.
Rui Zhang, PhD, Scientific Co-Director of our Innovative Methods & Data Science program, will serve as contact Principal Investigator for the project alongside Multiple Principal Investigators Jue Hou, PhD (Biostatistics), and Jinhua Wang, PhD, MBA (Cancer Informatics).
The aim of the project is to develop risk prediction models tailored to minority groups. Training equitable risk models on local health system data is difficult as minority groups are often underrepresented, leading to a small sample size.
Instead, the research team will develop risk models using data from the All of Us program. All of Us offers data from a diverse group of patients who are underrepresented in biomedical research. The researchers will evaluate the models and modify them as needed to work with data from healthcare systems instead of All of Us data.
This project will lead to more equitable risk prediction that is accurate and fair across racial and ethnic groups, reducing the number of misdiagnoses and adverse outcomes caused by risk models trained on data from primarily white patients.
