Learning To Predict Dental Caries For Preschool Children
Dental caries, or tooth decay/cavity, is a dental disease caused by bacterial infection. Of people from different age groups, preschooler children requires more attention since caries has become the most common chronic childhood diseases. More importantly, a skewed distribution of the diseases has been observed in Europe, US and Singapore among the children or preschoolers, which indicate a small portion of the population endures a big portion of caries incidences. Therefore, there is still the need to improve on the current caries control to identify the high-risk individuals and prevent resurgence in children in developed countries like Singapore. Our project will study on the data such as questionnaire responses, oral examination and biological tests of certain preschoolers from Singapore and use suitable learning methods to predict whether they have carries now and whether they are likely to get dental caries in the future. The final target of this project is to give a reasonable prediction on preschoolers’ dental caries rate based on the chosen statistical learning model and to reduce the feature space in order to improve the utility of the models in the clinic context.
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