Learning and inspecting classification rules from longitudinal epidemiological data to identify predictive features on hepatic steatosis

•Mining workflow for data-driven analysis of epidemiological data.•Interactive Rule Miner for the study of subpopulations in epidemiological data.•Findings from data-driven cohort analysis on the outcome “hepatic steatosis”.

Personalized medicine requires the analysis of epidemiological data for the identification of subgroups sharing some risk factors and exhibiting dedicated outcome risks. We investigate the potential of data mining methods for the analysis of subgroups of cohort participants on hepatic steatosis. We propose a workflow for data preparation and mining on epidemiological data and we present InteractiveRuleMiner, an interactive tool for the inspection of rules in each subpopulation, including functionalities for the juxtaposition of labeled individuals and unlabeled ones. We report on our insights on specific subpopulations that have been discovered in a data-driven rather than hypothesis-driven way.