Profiling blood donors in Egypt: A neural network analysis

This study uses intelligent modeling techniques to examine the effect of various demographic, cognitive and psychographic factors on blood donation in Egypt. Two artificial neural network models (multi-layer perceptron neural network [MLP] and probabilistic neural network [PNN]) are compared to a standard statistical method (linear discriminant analysis [LDA]). The variable sets considered are sex, age, educational level, altruistic values, perceived risks of blood donation, blood donation knowledge, attitudes toward blood donation, and intention to donate blood. The paper shows how it is possible to identify various dimensions of blood donation behavior by uncovering patterns in the dataset, and also shows the classification abilities of two neural network techniques.