1Department of Artificial Intelligence Software, Korea Polytechnics
2Department of Dental Hygiene, Hanseo University
3Department of Dental Hygiene, College of Health Sciences, Yonsei University
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
Correspondence to Jung Yun Kang, Department of Dental Hygiene, College of Health Sciences, Yonsei University, 1 Yonseidae-gil, Wonjusi, Gangwon-do, 26493, Korea. Tel: +82-33-760-5564, Fax: +82-33-760-2919, E-mail: hannahkang@yonsei.ac.kr
Volume 26, Number 2, Pages 243–52, April 2026.
J Korean Soc Dent Hyg 2026;26(2):243–52. https://doi.org/10.13065/jksdh.2026.26.2.11
Received on February 25, 2026, Revised on March 24, 2026, Accepted on April 08, 2026, Published on April 30, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 Journal of Korean Society of Dental Hygiene.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0).
Objectives: This study aimed to develop and evaluate a deep neural network (DNN)-based predictive model for periodontal disease expenditures using community-level health environmental factors derived from public data. Methods: A total of 1,020 monthly records from 17 regions between January 2020 and December 2024 were analyzed. Independent variables included health behaviors, demographic characteristics, socioeconomic factors, and healthcare resource accessibility. A DNN model was constructed and evaluated using the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), while permutation feature importance (PFI) was applied to quantify the relative contribution of each variable. Results: The DNN model achieved a mean MAPE of 11.01% (range: 9.35–12.51; SD: 0.83) across 10 repeated trials, indicating good predictive performance according to the Lewis (1982) criteria. PFI analysis identified total population, proportion of single-person households, and gender ratio as the most influential predictors of periodontal disease expenditures. Conclusions: These findings suggest that periodontal disease expenditures are shaped by complex interactions among demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors, which can be effectively captured by AI-based predictive models. This study provides preliminary evidence that healthcare resource allocation and oral health policy development can benefit from AI-based approaches utilizing publicly available data.
Artificial intelligence, Health expenditures, Periodontal diseases, Public health data, Socioeconomic factors