Determining Attributes of Suicide Attempts in Korean Elderly People: Emphasis on Attribute Selection Techniques

In order to prevent the elderly people from committing suicide attempts, it is necessary to verify attributes that affect the suicide attempts. It is noted that previous studies have focused on qualitative approaches, and simple correlation analyses to determine the attributes related to the suicide attempts in the elderly people. However, such previous approaches had led to insufficient performance when facing with complicated data sets. In this sense, this study suggests an alternative method in which attribute selection techniques are adopted to determine more relevant attributes of the suicide attempts occurring in Korean elderly people. To verify empirical validity of our proposed method, we used Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) from January 2007 to December 2012. Empirical results proved that the proposed attribute selection techniques showed better predictive effectiveness; 94.4% compared to the simple statistical methods. This study proposes a way to determining the elderly suicide and preventing it to happen.