County-level socio-environmental factors and obesity prevalence in the United States.

ABSTRACT:

Aims

To investigate high-risk sociodemographic and environmental determinants of health (SEDH) potentially associated with adult obesity in counties in the United States using machine-learning techniques.

Materials and methods

We performed a cross-sectional analysis of county-level adult obesity prevalence (body mass index ≥30 kg/m²) in the United States using data from the Diabetes Surveillance System 2017. We harvested 49 county-level SEDH factors that were used in a classification and regression trees (CART) model to identify county-level clusters. The CART model was validated using a 'hold-out' set of counties and variable importance was evaluated using Random Forest.

Results

Overall, we analysed 2752 counties in the United States, identifying a nationa

SUBMITTER: Salerno PRVO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11447680 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature