Study Question:
What methods can be used to improve prediction of suicide and suicidal behavior and develop efficient methods for detecting very high-risk individuals?

Objectives:
--To select the most predictive measures from domains of risk and protective factors
--To maximize the predictive power of the selected measures from each domain and across domains
--To assess the generality of the findings and examine the structure of the associations among the most predictive measures
--To access the degree of improved performance with results obtained from more commonly used statistical models

Study methodology:
This study utilizes three large data sets found in the public domain: the National Comorbidity Survey, the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiological Survey and the National Mortality Followback Survey. These data sets will be analyzed with genetic algorithms, neural nets, and tree based regressions. The analysis will be conducted to select the most predictive measures, maximize the predictive power of the input measures, and interpret the constructed neural nets. The analysis will be cross-validated to test generality and compared to other, more standard, methods of analysis.