Principal Component Analysis on the Philippine Health Data

TL;DR

This paper applies principal component analysis to 2009 Philippine health data to identify key underlying health system components, reducing correlated variables into uncorrelated indices that explain most data variance.

Contribution

It identifies three significant underlying components in Philippine health data, providing a simplified understanding of health determinants.

Findings

Three key components explain 73.01% of variance.

Components relate to water supply, health stations, and women's health.

Data reduction aids health policy analysis.

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine the structures of a set of n correlated variables and creates a new set of uncorrelated indices which are the underlying components of the Philippine health data.The data utilized in this study was the 2009 Philippine Health Data which was made available by National Statistical Coordination Board(NSCB) in its 2009 publication.The publication contains the health data of 81 provinces of the Philippines consisting of ten system-related determinants which was considered as the variables in this study. From the ten health system-related determinants, it was found out that there are three significant underlying components that could summarize the Philippine health data. The first component was named as importance of safe water supply and emphasis on child heat while the second and third component were named as importance of Barangay Health Stations, government health workers and emphasis on pregnant women's health and emphasis on women's health, respectively. These three components jointly account for a total of 73.01% of the total variance explained by the component.