Extracting Leading Joint Causes of Death and Mining Associations between Them

The gains in analyzing death from a multiple cause perspective have been recognized for a very long time. Methods that have been adopted have sought to determine additional gains made by treating death as a multiple cause phenomenon as compared to analysis based on a single under-lying cause. This paper shows how association rules mining methodology can be adapted to determine joint morbid causes with strong and interesting associations. Results show that some causes of death that do not appear among the leading causes show strong associations with other causes that would otherwise remain unknown without the use of association rules methodology. Overall, the study found that the leading joint pair of causes of death in South Africa was metabolic disorders and intestinal infectious diseases which accounted for 18.9 deaths per 1000 in 2008, followed by cerebrovascular and hypertensive diseases which accounted for 18.3 deaths per 1000.