Using random forest algorithm for glomerular and tubular injury diagnosis

OBJECTIVES: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a common chronic condition with high incidence and insidious onset. Glomerular injury (GI) and tubular injury (TI) represent early manifestations of CKD and could indicate the risk of its development. In this study, we aimed to classify GI and TI using three machine learning algorithms to promote their early diagnosis and slow the progression of CKD. METHODS: Demographic information, physical examination, blood, and morning urine samples were first collected from 13,550 subjects in 10 counties in Shanxi province for classification of GI and TI. Besides, LASSO regression was employed for feature selection of explanatory variables, and the SMOTE (synthetic minority over-sampling technique) algorithm was used to balance target datasets, i.e., GI and TI. Afterward, Random Forest (RF), Naive Bayes (NB), and logistic regression (LR) were constructed to achieve classification of GI and TI, respectively. RESULTS: A total of 12,330 participants enrolled in this study, with 20 explanatory variables. The number of patients with GI, and TI were 1,587 (12.8%) and 1,456 (11.8%), respectively. After feature selection by LASSO, 14 and 15 explanatory variables remained in these two datasets. Besides, after SMOTE, the number of patients and normal ones were 6,165, 6,165 for GI, and 6,165, 6,164 for TI, respectively. RF outperformed NB and LR in terms of accuracy (78.14, 80.49%), sensitivity (82.00, 84.60%), specificity (74.29, 76.09%), and AUC (0.868, 0.885) for both GI and TI; the four variables contributing most to the classification of GI and TI represented SBP, DBP, sex, age and age, SBP, FPG, and GHb, respectively. CONCLUSION: RF boasts good performance in classifying GI and TI, which allows for early auxiliary diagnosis of GI and TI, thus facilitating to help alleviate the progression of CKD, and enjoying great prospects in clinical practice.