Machine learning as a tool to identify inpatients who are not at risk of adverse drug events in a large dataset of a tertiary care hospital in the USA

Abstract

AimsAdverse drug events (ADEs) are a major threat to inpatients in the United States of America (USA). It is unknown how well machine learning (ML) is able to predict whether or not a patient will suffer from an ADE during hospital stay based on data available at hospital admission for emergency department patients of all ages (binary classification task). It is further unknown whether ML is able to outperform logistic regression (LR) in doing so, and which variables are the most important predictors.MethodsIn this study, 5 ML models— namely a random forest, gradient boosting machine (GBM), ridge regression, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression, and elastic net regression—as well as a LR were trained and tested for the prediction of inpatient ADEs identified using ICD‐10‐CM codes based on comprehensive previous work in a diverse population. In total, 210 181 observations from patients who were admitted to a large tertiary care hospital after emergency department stay between 2011 and 2019 were included. The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) and AUC–precision‐recall (AUC‐PR) were used as primary performance indicators.ResultsTree‐based models performed best with respect to AUC and AUC‐PR. The gradient boosting machine (GBM) reached an AUC of 0.747 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.735 to 0.759) and an AUC‐PR of 0.134 (95% CI: 0.131 to 0.137) on unforeseen test data, while the random forest reached an AUC of 0.743 (95% CI: 0.731 to 0.755) and an AUC‐PR of 0.139 (95% CI: 0.135 to 0.142), respectively. ML statistically significantly outperformed LR both on AUC and AUC‐PR. Nonetheless, overall, models did not differ much with respect to their performance. Most important predictors were admission type, temperature and chief complaint for the best performing model (GBM).ConclusionsThe study demonstrated a first application of ML to predict inpatient ADEs based on ICD‐10‐CM codes, and a comparison with LR. Future research should address concerns arising from low precision and related problems.