Indirect state-level estimation of sexual minority adolescent populations by sex, age, and race/ethnicity using random forests
Bruno Alves-Maciel, Sanjana Pampati, Ari Fodeman, Michelle Van Handel, Lijia Zheng, Ziping Ye, Reza Yaesoubi, Joshua A. Salomon, katsuya oi, katsuya oi, katsuya oi · 2026
Read Indirect state-level estimation of sexual minority adolescent populations by sex, age, and race/ethnicity using random forests by Bruno Alves-Maciel, Sanjana Pampati, Ari Fodeman, Michelle Van Handel, Lijia Zheng, Ziping Ye, Reza Yaesoubi, Joshua A. Salomon, katsuya oi, katsuya oi, katsuya oi (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13249400.txt.
Description
Alves-Maciel and colleagues estimated how many U.S. high school students identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in states that never ask, in a 2026 study. Most states run youth risk surveys, but some omit the sexual identity question, leaving health planners blind. The team trained random forest models, separately by sex, on states with complete 2021 data.
The forests beat a standard regression benchmark at predicting shares by state, sex, age, and racial or ethnic group. Estimated shares ranged from about five to thirty percent across groups and states, and the filled-in states landed inside the same range. The authors offer the estimates for targeting health support to sexual minority teenagers.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Bruno Alves-Maciel, Sanjana Pampati, Ari Fodeman, Michelle Van Handel, Lijia Zheng, Ziping Ye, Reza Yaesoubi, Joshua A. Salomon, katsuya oi, katsuya oi, katsuya oi |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 58 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |