Yoga practice in the United States: Are people who have used mental health counseling services more likely to practice it?

Objective: This study aims to assess whether people who have used mental health counseling services are more likely to practice yoga among adults in the United States . Methods: Data from the Adult Complementary Health Supplement (ACH) in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) were used. Logistic regression analysis and artificial neural network are applied to train and then test the model. Area Under the Curve (AUC) and ROC curves are estimated. Results: The Area Under the Curve (AUC) is about 0.80for training sample according to above logistic regression, meaning that a randomly selected individual from the positive group has a test value larger than that for a randomly chosen individual from the negative group 80percent of the time. After logistic regression and network analysis were conducted in the training sample, we used the outputs from both models to predict the likelihood in the testing sample. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves were 81% and 82% for the logistic model and the neural network, respectively. There were no significant differences in predictive ability between the two approaches. Conclusion: In this study, we built a predictive model for adult practice of Yoga by using Logistic regression analysis and neural networking model, and then evaluated the performance of the models. In our research, both logistic regression and neural network models did a good job of predicting the probability of adult practice of Yoga. We confirmed our hypothesis that people who have used mental health counseling services are more likely to practice yoga among adults in the United States .