Identification of Prevalent Exposure Biomarkers in the U.S. Population Using NHANES-presentation
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This presentation will examine an approach for analyzing NHANES data using frequent itemset mining (FIM), a technique traditionally used for market basket analysis. We analyzed data from the 2009-2010 cycle of the continuous National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to identify combinations of chemicals that frequently co occur in people. We identified 90 chemical combinations consisting of relatively few chemicals that occur in at least 30% of the U.S. population. Certain combinations were far more prevalent in vulnerable populations, for example the combination of monoisobutyl phthalate and mono-n-butyl phthalate was much more prevalent in children than in the general population. This work demonstrated how FIM can be used in conjunction with biomonitoring data to narrow the large number of combinations of chemicals that could be formed from NHANES chemicals down to a smaller number of prevalent chemical combinations.