A comparison of random survival forest and Cox regression for prediction of mortality in patients with hemorrhagic stroke

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate RSF and Cox models for mortality prediction of hemorrhagic stroke (HS) patients in intensive care unit (ICU). METHODS: In the training set, the optimal models were selected using five-fold cross-validation and grid search method. In the test set, the bootstrap method was used to validate. The area under the curve(AUC) was used for discrimination, Brier Score (BS) was used for calibration, positive predictive value(PPV), negative predictive value(NPV), and F1 score were combined to compare. RESULTS: A total of 2,990 HS patients were included. For predicting the 7-day mortality, the mean AUCs for RSF and Cox regression were 0.875 and 0.761, while the mean BS were 0.083 and 0.108. For predicting the 28-day mortality, the mean AUCs for RSF and Cox regression were 0.794 and 0.649, while the mean BS were 0.129 and 0.174. The mean AUCs of RSF and Cox versus conventional scores for predicting patients’ 7-day mortality were 0.875 (RSF), 0.761 (COX), 0.736 (SAPS II), 0.723 (OASIS), 0.632 (SIRS), and 0.596 (SOFA), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: RSF provided a better clinical reference than Cox. Creatine, temperature, anion gap and sodium were important variables in both models. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12911-023-02293-2.