Predicting COVID-19 mortality risk in Toronto, Canada: a comparison of tree-based and regression-based machine learning methods

BMC Medical Research Methodology

Elizabeth Juarez-Colunga¹  Cindy Feng²  George Kephart² 

[1] Department of Biostatistics and Informatics, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, 80045 Aurora, 80045, Colorado, USA;Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, 5790 University Avenue, B3H 1V7, Halifax, NS, Canada;

关键词: COVID-19 mortality;    Predictive model;    Generalized additive model;    Classification trees;    Extreme gradient boosting;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12874-021-01441-4

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundCoronavirus disease (COVID-19) presents an unprecedented threat to global health worldwide. Accurately predicting the mortality risk among the infected individuals is crucial for prioritizing medical care and mitigating the healthcare system’s burden. The present study aimed to assess the predictive accuracy of machine learning methods to predict the COVID-19 mortality risk.MethodsWe compared the performance of classification tree, random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), logistic regression, generalized additive model (GAM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to predict the mortality risk among 49,216 COVID-19 positive cases in Toronto, Canada, reported from March 1 to December 10, 2020. We used repeated split-sample validation and k-steps-ahead forecasting validation. Predictive models were estimated using training samples, and predictive accuracy of the methods for the testing samples was assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, Brier’s score, calibration intercept and calibration slope.ResultsWe found XGBoost is highly discriminative, with an AUC of 0.9669 and has superior performance over conventional tree-based methods, i.e., classification tree or RF methods for predicting COVID-19 mortality risk. Regression-based methods (logistic, GAM and LASSO) had comparable performance to the XGBoost with slightly lower AUCs and higher Brier’s scores.ConclusionsXGBoost offers superior performance over conventional tree-based methods and minor improvement over regression-based methods for predicting COVID-19 mortality risk in the study population.

【 授权许可】

CC BY