Artificial intelligence forecasting mortality at an intensive care unit and comparison to a logistic regression system

OBJECTIVE: To explore an artificial intelligence approach based on gradient-boosted decision trees for prediction of all-cause mortality at an intensive care unit, comparing its performance to a recent logistic regression system in the literature, and a logistic regression model built on the same platform. METHODS: A gradient-boosted decision trees model and a logistic regression model were trained and tested with the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care database. The 1-hour resolution physiological measurements of adult patients, collected during 5 hours in the intensive care unit, consisted of eight routine clinical parameters. The study addressed how the models learn to categorize patients to predict intensive care unit mortality or survival within 12 hours. The performance was evaluated with accuracy statistics and the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve. RESULTS: The gradient-boosted trees yielded an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve of 0.89, compared to 0.806 for the logistic regression. The accuracy was 0.814 for the gradient-boosted trees, compared to 0.782 for the logistic regression. The diagnostic odds ratio was 17.823 for the gradient-boosted trees, compared to 9.254 for the logistic regression. The Cohen’s kappa, F-measure, Matthews correlation coefficient, and markedness were higher for the gradient-boosted trees. CONCLUSION: The discriminatory power of the gradient-boosted trees was excellent. The gradient-boosted trees outperformed the logistic regression regarding intensive care unit mortality prediction. The high diagnostic odds ratio and markedness values for the gradient-boosted trees are important in the context of the studied unbalanced dataset.