Critical Care Data Preprocessing Report

Prepared by: Hitesh Gowda M

1. Introduction

In the field of healthcare, especially in critical care scenarios, analyzing and understanding patient data is

vital for early diagnosis, effective treatment planning, and predictive healthcare. With the increasing

availability of electronic health records (EHRs), it has become crucial to preprocess and prepare such data

for analytical and machine learning applications. This report focuses on the preprocessing of a critical care

dataset containing data from 5000 patients.

The dataset includes a wide range of clinical attributes such as Age, Gender, BMI, vital sign indicators like

HRV (Heart Rate Variability), RRV (Respiration Rate Variability), SpO2 (Oxygen Saturation), and lifestyle

features including Smoking and Drinking habits. Additionally, it includes medical history details and patient

health outcomes categorized under Health_Status and Risk_Score, which are particularly useful in assessing

patient condition.

This report aims to walk through the process of preparing this dataset for machine learning. The steps include

data visualization, handling missing data, encoding categorical variables, and converting boolean data to

numerical format. Each of these preprocessing stages plays a fundamental role in making the raw dataset

usable for model training and accurate predictions.

2. Library Installation & Import

Before diving into data analysis, it's necessary to ensure all the required Python libraries are installed.

Libraries like NumPy and Pandas provide foundational support for handling numerical and tabular data.

Matplotlib and Seaborn are used for creating static visualizations, while Plotly is employed for interactive

visual analytics. TensorFlow and Scikit-learn, on the other hand, are vital for future machine learning and

neural network modeling.

Installing these libraries ensures the environment is set up to support a variety of operations including loading

datasets, processing data, visualization, and applying machine learning algorithms. The use of `!pip install`
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commands in Google Colab helps make sure all packages are available during runtime without local

installations.

After installing the libraries, they are imported into the project using the Python `import` statements. This step

brings in the functionality of each library, enabling us to use functions such as `read_csv()` for loading data,

`countplot()` for visualization, and various encoding methods from Pandas for converting categorical data.

3. Dataset Overview

The dataset used in this project is a synthetic but structured health dataset containing 5000 rows and 16

columns. Each row corresponds to an individual patient record with features including demographic details

(such as Age and Gender), lifestyle indicators (Smoking_Status, Drinking_Status), physiological

measurements (ECG, EEG, HRV, RRV), and health risk assessments (Health_Status, Risk_Score).

By using `data.columns` and `data.info()`, we get a high-level view of what type of data each column holds,

how many values are missing, and what data types are used (integer, float, object). This is critical to decide

how to handle missing values and which columns need transformation.

Additionally, `data.describe()` provides summary statistics like mean, standard deviation, and quartiles for

numerical features. This helps in identifying outliers, skewness, and the need for further scaling or

normalization during modeling. Understanding these metrics at an early stage allows for better-informed

preprocessing decisions.

4. Initial Visual Analysis

To understand data distributions and spot patterns, visualization techniques are applied. The first step

involves checking the distribution of categorical variables such as Health_Status using count plots. This

provides a clear picture of how patients are categorized and whether the dataset is balanced across health

categories.

Box plots, such as Age vs Health_Status, allow us to observe the age spread for different patient conditions.
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For example, patients in the 'Worsening' category may show higher median ages compared to 'Normal' ones,

hinting at age-related risk factors.

Scatter plots and pairplots further reveal relationships between variables such as HRV and RRV or SpO2 and

BMI. These visualizations are essential for identifying potential correlations, multicollinearity, or clustering,

which may influence how we select features for predictive modeling.

5. Data Cleaning

Data cleaning is a critical preprocessing step that ensures the integrity and quality of the dataset. The main

issue identified in the dataset was missing values, especially in the 'Medical_History' column, which had

significant null entries. To simplify preprocessing and avoid introducing noise, all rows with missing values

were dropped.

After removing rows with missing data using `data.dropna()`, the dataset was reduced from 5000 to 2619

rows. Although this results in a smaller dataset, it eliminates the complexity and potential inaccuracies of

imputing medical conditions or other sensitive values.

This decision helps ensure that the remaining data is fully complete and suitable for accurate model training

without making assumptions about unknown values. It's particularly useful when working on healthcare data

where incorrect imputation could lead to misleading predictions.

6. Encoding
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Machine learning algorithms require all inputs to be in numerical form. As a result, categorical variables such

as Gender, Smoking_Status, and Health_Status were converted using one-hot encoding. This method

creates binary columns for each category, indicating whether a particular row belongs to that category.

To avoid redundancy and multicollinearity, the first category in each column was dropped (`drop_first=True`),

which is a standard practice in encoding to reduce dimensionality without losing information. For example, if

Gender has Male and Female, we keep only one binary column: Gender_Male.

Medical_History had a large number of unique combinations like 'Diabetes_Type2;Hypertension', which after

one-hot encoding resulted in a wide expansion of features. Though this increased the number of columns to

235, it allowed the machine learning model to differentiate between very specific medical conditions for

accurate predictions.

7. Final Dataset

After completing all preprocessing steps, the final dataset was structured, clean, and fully numerical. It

contained 2619 rows and 235 columns. These columns include original numeric values and the one-hot

encoded binary columns derived from categorical attributes.

This transformation ensures compatibility with various machine learning models, which require inputs in

consistent numerical formats. Additionally, boolean values generated through encoding were converted to 0s

and 1s to further simplify the data structure.

The final dataset is now ready for exploratory data analysis, correlation mapping, and training predictive

models. The preprocessing ensures no missing values, all features are machine-readable, and the

categorical distinctions are preserved with meaningful encoding.

8. Conclusion

This report presents a step-by-step preprocessing pipeline that transforms a raw critical care dataset into a

structured format ready for machine learning. Through careful handling of missing values, visualization for
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insight, and encoding for numerical conversion, the dataset has been effectively prepared.

Each stage of the process was implemented with medical data reliability in mind'ensuring no assumptions

were made during cleaning, and preserving essential health patterns through accurate encoding. The use of

visuals also supports better understanding and transparency of the health indicators.

With the final processed dataset in place, the next steps could involve feature selection, model building, and

evaluation to predict patient health status or risk scores. This preprocessing foundation is crucial for

producing trustworthy and high-performing healthcare models.