Learning to Address Health Inequality in the United States with a Bayesian Decision Network

Life-expectancy is a complex outcome driven by genetic, socio-demographic, environmental and geographic factors. Increasing socio-economic and health disparities in the United States are propagating the longevity-gap, making it a cause for concern. Earlier studies have probed individual factors but an integrated picture to reveal quantifiable actions has been missing. Amidst growing concerns about the further widening of healthcare inequality and differential access created by Artificial Intelligence, it is imperative to explore it's potential for illuminating biases and enabling transparent policy decisions. In this work, we reveal actionable interventions for decreasing the longevity-gap in the United States by analyzing a County-level data resource with healthcare, socio-economic, behavioral, education and demographic features. We learn an ensemble-averaged structure, draw inferences using the joint probability distribution and extend it to a Bayesian Decision Network for identifying policy actions. We draw quantitative estimates for the positive roles of diversity, preventive-care quality and stable-families within the unified framework of our decision network. Finally, we make this analysis and dashboard available as an interactive web-application for enabling users and policy-makers to validate our insights on bridging the longevity-gap and explore the ones beyond reported in this work.