{"doi":"10.1109/access.2023.3295777","title":"Multi-Task Classification for Improved Health Outcome Prediction Based on Environmental Indicators","abstract":"The influence of the neighborhood environment on health outcomes has been widely recognized in various studies. Google street view (GSV) images offer a unique and valuable tool for evaluating neighborhood environments on a large scale. By annotating the images with labels indicating the presence or absence of certain neighborhood features, we can develop classifiers that can automatically analyze and evaluate the environment. However, labeling GSV images on a large scale is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. Considering these challenges, we propose using a multi-task classifier to improve training a classifier with limited supervised, GSV data. Our multi-task classifier utilizes readily available, inexpensive online images collected from Flicker as a related classification task. The hypothesis is that a classifier trained on multiple related tasks is less likely to overfit to small amounts of training data and generalizes better to unseen data. We leverage the power of multiple related tasks to improve the classifier’s overall performance and generalization capability. Here we show that, with the proposed learning paradigm, predicted labels for GSV test images are more accurate. Across different environment indicators, the accuracy, F1 score and balanced accuracy increase up to 6 % in the multi-task learning framework compared to its single-task learning counterpart. The enhanced accuracy of the predicted labels obtained through the multi-task classifier contributes to a more reliable and precise regression analysis determining the correlation between predicted built environment indicators and health outcomes. The R2values calculated for different health outcomes improve by up to 4 % using multi-task learning detected indicators.","journal":"IEEE Access","year":2023,"id":356276,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9522,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":286122,"name":"Quynh C. Nguyen","orcid":"0000-0003-4745-6681","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":529851,"name":"Ross Whitaker","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":286130,"name":"Tolga Taşdizen","orcid":"0000-0001-6574-0366","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1105005,"name":"Mitra Alirezaei","orcid":"0000-0003-2417-1659","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":44,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:13:25.429924Z","pmid":"38405414","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}