What drives performance in machine learning models for predicting heart failure outcome?

Aims The development of acute heart failure (AHF) is a critical decision point in the natural history of the disease and carries a dismal prognosis. The lack of appropriate risk-stratification tools at hospital discharge of AHF patients significantly limits clinical ability to precisely tailor patient-specific therapeutic regimen at this pivotal juncture. Machine learning-based strategies may improve risk stratification by incorporating analysis of high-dimensional patient data with multiple covariates and novel prediction methodologies. In the current study, we aimed at evaluating the drivers for success in prediction models and establishing an institute-tailored artificial Intelligence-based prediction model for real-time decision support. Methods and results We used a cohort of all 10 868 patients AHF patients admitted to a tertiary hospital during a 12 years period. A total of 372 covariates were collected from admission to the end of the hospitalization. We assessed model performance across two axes: (i) type of prediction method and (ii) type and number of covariates. The primary outcome was 1-year survival from hospital discharge. For the model-type axis, we experimented with seven different methods: logistic regression (LR) with either L₁ or L₂ regularization, random forest (RF), Cox proportional hazards model (Cox), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), a deep neural-net (NeuralNet) and an ensemble classifier of all the above methods. We were able to achieve an area under receiver operator curve (AUROC) prediction accuracy of more than 80% with most prediction models including L1/L2-LR (80.4%/80.3%), Cox (80.2%), XGBoost (80.5%), NeuralNet (80.4%). RF was inferior to other methods (78.8%), and the ensemble model was slightly superior (81.2%). The number of covariates was a significant modifier (P < 0.001) of prediction success, the use of multiplex-covariates preformed significantly better (AUROC 80.4% for L1-LR) compared with a set of known clinical covariates (AUROC 77.8%). Demographics followed by lab-tests and administrative data resulted in the largest gain in model performance. Conclusions The choice of the predictive modelling method is secondary to the multiplicity and type of covariates for predicting AHF prognosis.