Clinical Data based XGBoost Algorithm for infection risk prediction of patients with decompensated cirrhosis: a 10-year (2012–2021) Multicenter Retrospective Case-control study

OBJECTIVES: To appraise effective predictors for infection in patients with decompensated cirrhosis (DC) by using XGBoost algorithm in a retrospective case-control study. METHODS: Clinical data were retrospectively collected from 6,648 patients with DC admitted to five tertiary hospitals. Indicators with significant differences were determined by univariate analysis and least absolute contraction and selection operator (LASSO) regression. Further multi-tree extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) machine learning-based model was used to rank importance of features selected from LASSO and subsequently constructed infection risk prediction model with simple-tree XGBoost model. Finally, the simple-tree XGBoost model is compared with the traditional logical regression (LR) model. Performances of models were evaluated by area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), sensitivity, and specificity. RESULTS: Six features, including total bilirubin, blood sodium, albumin, prothrombin activity, white blood cell count, and neutrophils to lymphocytes ratio were selected as predictors for infection in patients with DC. Simple-tree XGBoost model conducted by these features can predict infection risk accurately with an AUROC of 0.971, sensitivity of 0.915, and specificity of 0.900 in training set. The performance of simple-tree XGBoost model is better than that of traditional LR model in training set, internal verification set, and external feature set (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The simple-tree XGBoost predictive model developed based on a minimal amount of clinical data available to DC patients with restricted medical resources could help primary healthcare practitioners promptly identify potential infection. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12876-023-02949-3.