MLPH: Machine Learning in Public Health

Public health and population health refer to the study of daily life factors and prevention efforts, and their effects on the health of populations. We expect that work featured in this workshop will differ from Machine Learning in Healthcare as it will focus on data and algorithms related to the non-medical conditions that shape our health including structural, lifestyle, policy, social, behavior and environmental factors. Indeed, much of the data that is traditionally used in machine learning and health problems are really about our interactions with the health care system, and this workshop aims to balance this with machine learning work using data on the non-medical conditions that shape our health. There are many machine learning opportunities specific to these data and how they are used to assess and understand health and disease, that differ from healthcare specific data and tasks (e.g. the data is often unstructured, must be captured across the life-course, in different environments, etc.) This is pertinent for both infectious diseases such as COVID-19 and non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, stroke, etc. Indeed, this workshop topic is especially timely given the COVID outbreak, protests regarding racism, and associated interest in exploring relevance of machine learning to questions around disease incidence, prevention and mitigation related to both of these and their synergy. These questions require the use of data from outside of healthcare, as well as considerations of how machine learning can augment work in epidemiology and biostatistics.