Modelling of South African Hypertension: Comparative Analysis of the Classical and Bayesian Quantile Regression Approaches

Abstract

Hypertension has become a major public health challenge and a crucial area of research due to its high prevalence across the world including the sub-Saharan Africa. No previous study in South Africa has investigated the impact of blood pressure risk factors on different specific conditional quantile functions of systolic and diastolic blood pressure using Bayesian quantile regression. Therefore, this study presents a comparative analysis of the classical and Bayesian inference techniques to quantile regression. Both classical and Bayesian inference techniques were demonstrated on a sample of secondary data obtained from South African National Income Dynamics Study (2017–2018). Age, BMI, gender male, cigarette consumption and exercises presented statistically significant associations with both SBP and DBP across all the upper quantiles [Formula: see text]. The white noise phenomenon was observed on the diagnostic tests of convergence used in the study. Results suggested that the Bayesian approach to quantile regression reveals more precise estimates than the frequentist approach due to narrower width of the 95% credible intervals than the width of the 95% confidence intervals. It is therefore suggested that Bayesian approach to quantile regression modelling to be used to estimate hypertension.

Risk factors based vessel‐specific prediction for stages of coronary artery disease using Bayesian quantile regression machine learning method: Results from the PARADIGM registry

“…21 However, with the increased interest in machine learning methods in medical research, quantile regression has recently attracted attention as a valuable data analysis tool in the medical research area. 13 Kuhudzai et al 22 is the first study which indicated the impact of blood pressure risk factors in South Africa using BQR model. The study showed that the BQR model performs more accurate modeling for the hypertension estimate than classical approaches.…”