Ensemble learning for the early prediction of neonatal jaundice with genetic features

BACKGROUND: Neonatal jaundice may cause severe neurological damage if poorly evaluated and diagnosed when high bilirubin occurs. The study explored how to effectively integrate high-dimensional genetic features into predicting neonatal jaundice. METHODS: This study recruited 984 neonates from the Suzhou Municipal Central Hospital in China, and applied an ensemble learning approach to enhance the prediction of high-dimensional genetic features and clinical risk factors (CRF) for physiological neonatal jaundice of full-term newborns within 1-week after birth. Further, sigmoid recalibration was applied for validating the reliability of our methods. RESULTS: The maximum accuracy of prediction reached 79.5% Area Under Curve (AUC) by CRF and could be marginally improved by 3.5% by including genetic variant (GV). Feature importance illustrated that 36 GVs contributed 55.5% in predicting neonatal jaundice in terms of gain from splits. Further analysis revealed that the main contribution of GV was to reduce the false-positive rate, i.e., to increase the specificity in the prediction. CONCLUSIONS: Our study shed light on the theoretical and practical value of GV in the prediction of neonatal jaundice. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12911-021-01701-9.