Sepsis is a life-threatening and serious global health issue. This study combines knowledge with available hospital data to investigate the potential causes of Sepsis that can be affected by policy decisions. We investigate the underlying causal structure of this problem by combining clinical expertise with score-based, constraint-based, and hybrid structure learning algorithms. A novel approach to model averaging and knowledge-based constraints was implemented to arrive at a consensus structure for causal inference. The structure learning process highlighted the importance of exploring data-driven approaches alongside clinical expertise. This includes discovering unexpected, although reasonable, relationships from a clinical perspective. Hypothetical interventions on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Alcohol dependence, and Diabetes suggest that the presence of any of these risk factors in patients increases the likelihood of Sepsis. This finding, alongside measuring the effect of these risk factors on Sepsis, has potential policy implications. Recognising the importance of prediction in improving Sepsis related health outcomes, the model built is also assessed in its ability to predict Sepsis. The predictions generated by the consensus model were assessed for their accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. These three indicators all had results around 70%, and the AUC was 80%, which means the causal structure of the model is reasonably accurate given that the models were trained on data available for commissioning purposes only.

通过结合临床专业知识与基于评分、基于约束和混合结构学习算法，该研究研究了可能受政策决策影响的败血症潜在原因的潜在因果结构，并发现慢阻肺、酒精依赖和糖尿病等风险因素的存在会增加患者患败血症的可能性，从而对政策具有潜在影响。通过评估模型在预测败血症方面的能力，发现共识模型的预测准确度、敏感度和特异度均在70%左右，AUC为80%，说明该模型的因果结构在只使用可供委托目的的数据训练的情况下是相当准确的。

利用贝叶斯网络结构学习研究败血症潜在原因