  Despite considerable number of studies on risk factors for asthma onset, very
little is known about their relative importance. To have a full picture of
these factors, both categories, personal and environmental data, have to be
taken into account simultaneously, which is missing in previous studies. We
propose a framework to rank the risk factors from heterogeneous data sources of
the two categories. Established on top of EventShop and Personal EventShop,
this framework extracts about 400 features, and analyzes them by employing a
gradient boosting tree. The features come from sources including personal
profile and life-event data, and environmental data on air pollution, weather
and PM2.5 emission sources. The top ranked risk factors derived from our
framework agree well with the general medical consensus. Thus, our framework is
a reliable approach, and the discovered rankings of relative importance of risk
factors can provide insights for the prevention of asthma.
