Open Journal of Epidemiology, 2016, 6, 28-43 Published Online February 2016 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojepi http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojepi.2016.61005 How to cite this paper: Setlhare, K. and Forcheh, N. (2016) Extracting Leading Joint Causes of Death and Mining Associa- tions between Them. Open Journal of Epidemiology, 6, 28-43. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojepi.2016.61005 Extracting Leading Joint Causes of Death and Mining Associations between Them Keamogetse Setlhare, Ntonghanwah Forcheh Department of Statistics, University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana Received 21 November 2015; accepted 13 February 2016; published 16 February 2016 Copyright © 2016 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract The gains in analyzing death from a multiple cause perspective have been recognized for a very long time. Methods that have been adopted have sought to determine additional gains made by treating death as a multiple cause phenomenon as compared to analysis based on a single under- lying cause. This paper shows how association rules mining methodology can be adapted to de- termine joint morbid causes with strong and interesting associations. Results show that some causes of death that do not appear among the leading causes show strong associations with other causes that would otherwise remain unknown without the use of association rules methodology. Overall, the study found that the leading joint pair of causes of death in South Africa was metabolic disorders and intestinal infectious diseases which accounted for 18.9 deaths per 1000 in 2008, followed by cerebrovascular and hypertensive diseases which accounted for 18.3 deaths per 1000. Keywords Association Rule, Confidence, Interestingness, Multiple Cause of Death, South Africa, Odds-Ratio, Prevalence, Support 1. Introduction The analysis and reporting of causes of death continue to be dominated by the single underlying cause of death concept. As pointed out by [1], the philosophy behind the underlying cause concept is that if the starting point of the sequence of events that lead to death is known, then death can be prevented by preventing the initiating cause from operating. Hence, identifying leading underlying causes of death is very important in public health. Therefore, the underlying cause of death continues to be coded on death certificates. However, it has been rec- ognised since the first attempts to develop international systems for classification of causes of death that death rarely arises from a single cause [2], especially death caused by chronic pathologies among the elderly [3]. It has