Machine learning model for predicting 1-year and 3-year all-cause mortality in ischemic heart failure patients

Objective Machine learning (ML) model has not been developed specifically for ischemic heart failure (HF) patients. Whether the performance of ML model is better than the MAGGIC risk score and NT-proBNP is unknown. The current study was to apply ML algorithm to build risk model for predicting 1-year and 3-year all-cause mortality in ischemic HF patient and to compare the performance of ML model with the MAGGIC risk score and NT-proBNP. Method Three ML algorithms without and with feature selection were used for model exploration, and the performance was determined based on the area under the curve (AUC) in five-fold cross-validation. The best performing ML model was selected and compared with the MAGGIC risk score and NT-proBNP. The calibration of ML model was assessed by the Brier score. Results Random forest with feature selection had the highest AUC (0.742 and 95% CI: 0.697-0.787) for predicting 1-year all-cause mortality, and support vector machine without feature selection had the highest AUC (0.732 and 95% CI: 0.694-0.707) for predicting 3-year all-cause mortality. When compared to the MAGGIC risk score and NT-proBNP, ML model had a comparable AUC for predicting 1-year (0.742 vs 0.714 vs 0.694) and 3-year all-cause mortality (0.732 vs 0.712 vs 0.682). Brier scores for predicting 1-year and 3-year all-cause mortality were 0.068 and 0.174, respectively. Conclusion ML models predicted prognosis in ischemic HF with good discrimination and well calibration. These models may be used by clinicians as a decision-making tool to estimate the prognosis of ischemic HF patients.

Automated summary

This study applied machine learning algorithms to build a risk model for predicting all-cause mortality in ischemic heart failure patients. The performance of the machine learning model was compared with traditional risk scores and biomarkers. The results showed that the machine learning model had good discrimination and calibration, and performed comparably to the traditional methods.