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I am working on the Diabetes in 130 US hospitals for years 1999--2008 dataset. After removing unnecessary variables (i.e. some IDs or near-zero-variance variables) and doing some naive imptuation, I am left with

'data.frame':   101766 obs. of  31 variables:
   race                    : Factor w/ 5 levels "AfricanAmerican",..: 3 3 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ...
   gender                  : Factor w/ 3 levels "Female","Male",..: 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 ...
   age                     : Factor w/ 10 levels "[0-10)","[10-20)",..: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
   admission_type_id       : Factor w/ 8 levels "1","2","3","4",..: 6 1 1 1 1 2 3 1 2 3 ...
   discharge_disposition_id: Factor w/ 26 levels "1","2","3","4",..: 24 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 ...
   admission_source_id     : Factor w/ 17 levels "1","2","3","4",..: 1 7 7 7 7 2 2 7 4 4 ...
   time_in_hospital        : num  1 3 2 2 1 3 4 5 13 12 ...
   payer_code              : Factor w/ 17 levels "BC","CH","CM",..: 16 4 4 8 3 8 8 11 15 8 ...
   medical_specialty       : Factor w/ 72 levels "AllergyandImmunology",..: 38 19 12 63 19 19 63 19 19 19 ...
   num_lab_procedures      : num  41 59 11 44 51 31 70 73 68 33 ...
   num_procedures          : num  0 0 5 1 0 6 1 0 2 3 ...
   num_medications         : num  1 18 13 16 8 16 21 12 28 18 ...
   number_outpatient       : num  0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
   number_emergency        : num  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
   number_inpatient        : num  0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
   diag_1                  : Factor w/ 716 levels "10","11","110",..: 125 144 455 555 55 264 264 277 253 283 ...
   diag_2                  : Factor w/ 748 levels "11","110","111",..: 80 80 79 98 25 247 247 315 261 47 ...
   diag_3                  : Factor w/ 789 levels "11","110","111",..: 247 122 767 249 87 87 771 87 230 318 ...
   number_diagnoses        : num  1 9 6 7 5 9 7 8 8 8 ...
   A1Cresult               : Factor w/ 4 levels ">7",">8","None",..: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ...
   metformin               : Factor w/ 4 levels "Down","No","Steady",..: 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 2 ...
   glipizide               : Factor w/ 4 levels "Down","No","Steady",..: 2 2 3 2 3 2 2 2 3 2 ...
   glyburide               : Factor w/ 4 levels "Down","No","Steady",..: 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 ...
   pioglitazone            : Factor w/ 4 levels "Down","No","Steady",..: 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ...
   rosiglitazone           : Factor w/ 4 levels "Down","No","Steady",..: 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 ...
   insulin                 : Factor w/ 4 levels "Down","No","Steady",..: 2 4 2 4 3 3 3 2 3 3 ...
   change                  : Factor w/ 2 levels "Ch","No": 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 ...
   diabetesMed             : Factor w/ 2 levels "No","Yes": 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ...
   readmitted              : Factor w/ 3 levels "<30",">30","NO": 3 2 3 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 ...
   payer.code              : Factor w/ 18 levels "1","10","11",..: 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 ...
   medical.speciality      : Factor w/ 73 levels "1","10","11",..: 32 73 73 73 73 73 73 73 73 11 ...

The problem is, I have no idea how to reduce the dimensionality here or handle the diag_{1,2,3} variables. There simply seem to be too many levels involved. How should I go about doing this? All algorithms (multiple correspondence analysis, multiple factor analysis) I've tried struggle greatly and I do not see them completing in feasible time.

The goal is to predict the readmitted variable from the others. I am unable to learn even a simple decision tree due to the aforementioned issues.

kjetil b halvorsen
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d125q
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    I think you could try to specify better what you want to do and what you are willing to do, to allow people better understand how to help you. Maybe it is just because I am not specialist in (apparently) some medicine field. Based on my understanding of the partial picture you have provided, I could suggest to group values of a variable based on the literature (can you find online what are people who used these data did? how did they analyze them?) or based on some statistic rule of thumbs (e.g., transform a variable into a dummy; values under the median =0, values above the median=1) – Fuca26 Mar 12 '16 at 11:45
  • @Fuca26: Thank you. The [original paper](http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/781670/) appears to use grouping, too. The problem is that this dataset was assigned to me by a teaching assistant (who I doubt is a specialist in medicine either), so I am a little bit clueless. However, grouping seems promising -- but do tell anything else you can think of, please. – d125q Mar 12 '16 at 12:16
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    It depends on what analysis you want to implement. Readmitted does not seem a dummy variable, or? Maybe you can transform it into a dummy. If it was you could use a probit or logit model where Readmitted is the outcome and what you want/need are the control variables. So you get the predicted values of Readmitted and (if you need to) you can plot these values against some control variable of interest. – Fuca26 Mar 12 '16 at 12:33

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