Practice of the new supervised machine learning predictive analytics for glioma patient survival after tumor resection: Experiences in a high-volume Chinese center

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to assess the effectiveness of the Gradient Boosting (GB) algorithm on glioma prognosis prediction and to explore new predictive models for glioma patient survival after tumor resection. METHODS: A cohort of 776 glioma cases (WHO grades II–IV) between 2010 and 2017 was obtained. Clinical characteristics and biomarker information were reviewed. Subsequently, we constructed the conventional Cox survival model and three different supervised machine learning models, including support vector machine (SVM), random survival forest (RSF), Tree GB, and Component GB. Then, the model performance was compared with each other. At last, we also assessed the feature importance of models. RESULTS: The concordance indexes of the conventional survival model, SVM, RSF, Tree GB, and Component GB were 0.755, 0.787, 0.830, 0.837, and 0.840, respectively. All areas under the cumulative receiver operating characteristic curve of both GB models were above 0.800 at different survival times. Their calibration curves showed good calibration of survival prediction. Meanwhile, the analysis of feature importance revealed Karnofsky performance status, age, tumor subtype, extent of resection, and so on as crucial predictive factors. CONCLUSION: Gradient Boosting models performed better in predicting glioma patient survival after tumor resection than other models.